Teach to Teach: Training Women to Teach Spanish

Awamaki's Spanish teachers' cooperative is on its way to becoming an independent business. 

After all the capacity-building and teacher training that all of you have funded over the past year, the women are better teachers than ever. Business is growing: collectively, they have taught over 1400 hours so far this year--an increase of 30% over last year! They are earning money to take care of their families and save for their kids' education.

Our goal, with the Spanish teachers' cooperative and all of the women with whom we partner, is not just to help women make a living. While that is an important goal, and transformative for them and their communities, our bigger vision is to use our program like an incubator to help the women's associations with whom we partner learn to run their own business. We see a future in which they have clients that aren't us, and aren't dependent on Awamaki--or any one entity--for their business success. 

After introducing this idea to our artisan cooperatives over the course of the past year, we have just in the past few months broached this idea with our Spanish teachers cooperative. As one of our most ambitious and well-organized groups, they have been enthusiastic about learning to manage the Spanish school. 

But what does this mean? Well first, it meant registering their group in the Public Registry in Peru. They each gave a portion of their earnings for the registration fee (of which Awamaki, with your funds, paid half). They created bylaws and formalized their membership.

They have started compiling a shared library of resources. They asked Awamaki for storage space and a storage cabinet, and one of the teachers keeps the inventory of their teaching resources and student supplies. Whereas Awamaki staff used to hand out workbooks to new students, now the teachers manage the inventory of the workbooks. A few months ago, they even considered moving the cooperative out of our office and into their homes. They decided not to just yet, because they thought that their children would be a distraction if they were teaching from home. But we are really excited about their level of enthusiasm about learning to run the cooperative as their own business! 

There's lots of work left to do in the New Year, of course! The women have elected leadership, including a president, secretary and treasurer. The new president, Aby, is shown in the above picture. This next year, the new leaders will be working with Awamaki staff to learn the ins and outs of scheduling classes, creating invoices, managing payments, and ensuring quality standards. We have a ways to go, but we know that with your support, next year the cooperative will be able to take on more leadership and more responsibilities--thus ensuring a sustainable future for them and for their communities. Thank you for all your support making this happen!

 P.S.--We would love for you to be able to come and visit us, but we know that many of you live very far from Peru! Last month we invited our donors on a virtual visit to one of the more remote communities where we work. Check it out and get inspired to come and visit in the new year!