Cultivating Quechua Girls' Leadership in Peru

Dear supporters,

I am writing you to inform you of an important update to our Girls' Leadership Project. We have decided that we will not be continuing to raise funds for this project at this time, and we will be temporarily suspending the project. This is for two reasons.

First, we lack the startup funds. The nature of this project is that we will need most of the funding goal reached just to start it; we are unwilling to begin a program with teenage girls when we are unsure we have the funds to complete it. With some of our other projects, the few donations we receive would enable us to still carry out a corresponding level of programmatic activity, but that isn't the case with this project--it is all or nothing.

Secondly, and most importantly, we have just received an unexpected two-year grant for support in other trainings, including leadership training for our cooperatives. (This was unexpected because we thought the application was a long shot!) We are a small organization, and this is the largest grant we have ever recieved by a factor of about 150. It will be a serious responsibility and require all our energies to manage properly. We feel that fundraising for and launching a new girls' program would be too much for our small staff to carry out at the same time as this other new training program. Moreover, both programs would be too much to introduce to the cooperatives at once.

Equipping Quechua girls to be leaders remains necessary for the long-term sustainability of our cooperatives, as well as necessary for the future health and economic success of their community. The girls will be included and specially supported in the leadership training that the abovementioned grant funds. It is likely that we will revisit the project at the end of this year or the following year. In the meantime we will use the donations from this project to support the girls' participation in all-cooperative leadership training.

I appreciate your understanding as we make the difficult strategic decisions that will ensure Awamaki's long-term health and ultimately allow us to create a greater positive impact for the Quechua women, girls and communities that we serve. Please do not hesitate to contact us at info@awamaki.org with any further questions.

If you are interested in supporting or following our other work, please see our other active GlobalGiving projects:

Training Women to Teach Spanish

Empowering Women through Design

Capacity-Building for Rural Women Artisans

Links:

• Awamaki site