Economically Empowering Women & Kids in Cartagena

During this period the project moved forward on all fronts at once: strengthening the island’s collective of artisans and entrepreneurs, consolidating the community tourism route in Punta Arena and strengthening environmental education throughout the four island schools.

Objective 1 · Strengthening the Collective of Artists, Artisans, and Entrepreneurs

The collective of artists, artisans, and entrepreneurs keeps growing: it now includes 18 active members — 15 women and 3 men — from Cartagena, Punta Arena, and Bocachica. Their crafts span a wide range: crochet, macramé, and woodworking; jewelry made from recycled materials, totumo (calabash gourd), coconut, bone, and horn; and watercolor art, postcards, and cards.

This quarter the collective welcomed two new artisans from Bocachica, who work with natural materials such as wood, coconut, bone, horn, and seashell. Both are well known in their community for decades of experience in their craft and have represented the artisan guild at national-level events — the kind of artisans you don’t just stumble upon. We hope to help them train new artisans and pass on their knowledge.

Through the product co-creation workshops, we reviewed the quality of the pieces and identified opportunities for improvement so they can be included in the fairs we have taken part in since 2025, while also exploring new ways to connect them with Cartagena’s tourism market.

Fundación Bahía also launched a product line of its own to keep supporting the project: a collection of t-shirts and bags stamped with watercolor illustrations of birds from Tierra Bomba island, where each piece tells the story of a species worth protecting.

Objective 2 · Community Tourism

The community tourism route continues to move forward steadily: it has done more than 20 tours, driven by growing visibility for the route and by the alliance with Hotel Fénix Beach in Punta Arena.

On June 4th we welcomed a visit from the Starbucks team, structured around four moments: a plogging session on the beach; a kayak crossing to the new bird-watching point in the inner wetlands; a conversation with the community’s women eco-guides and entrepreneurs, who shared their work and a bit of Punta Arena’s history; and finally a visit to Red de Sueños, followed by lunch at the home of one of the women entrepreneurs. Experiences like this help raise the route’s visibility and build alliances with organizations interested in corporate social responsibility, connecting the community tourism offering with national and local platforms.

Objective 3 · Environmental Education

To keep strengthening environmental education, we launched the Punta Arena Youth Environmental Guardians Network (Red de Jóvenes Veedores Ambientales), in alliance with the IETB school in Tierra Bomba, aimed at building student leadership and encouraging care for the environment through environmental education activities, monitoring of local environmental issues, awareness campaigns, and conservation actions for the island’s ecosystems.

With the support of volunteer students from Universidad de Cartagena, we carried out three butterfly-watching outings and identified a total of 19 species from different families recorded in Colombia — good evidence of the biodiversity held by Punta Arena’s tropical dry forest.

During the week of July 6–9 we ran the Guardianes del Territorio (Guardians of the Territory) volunteer program, bringing together children from Cartagena, Punta Arena, and abroad with local and international volunteers. Highlights included a beach cleanup that kept 20 kilograms of waste — 7.65 kg ordinary, 12.4 kg plastic — out of the sea; a kayak immersion into the wetland’s mangroves and dry forest, with sightings of the white ibis, black ibis, yellow-legged heron, great egret, tricolored heron, bicolored conebill, ringed kingfisher, and Panama flycatcher, capped by lunch at Laura’s house and an afternoon of bird watercolors; and a closing iguana-conservation workshop at the IETB school, where each child crafted their own iguana figure. Three days of paddling, painting, and cleanup that turned island, city, and visiting kids into a single team of guardians.

The project continues to move forward with strength, boosting entrepreneurship and income generation through the tourism route and support for artisans, as well as strengthening the island’s culinary culture and recovering the stories of its elder women. At the same time, the Environmental Guardians Network keeps growing, and we have strengthened environmental and artistic education in all four schools on the island — now with the added help of a 3D map of Colombia donated by Visión Amazonía, a wonderful tool for learning about the country’s geography, mountains, and forests. Finally, we continue getting to know the island’s biodiversity, now with the characterization of Punta Arena’s butterflies — work that will surely inspire new watercolor illustrations and a future guide for students on the island and in Cartagena.

Thank you so much for your continued support. We look forward to welcoming you in Punta Arena!

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