Gender Equality Ecuador Project #32064

Empower Ecuadorian Women to Elevate Communities

by Fundacion Hearts of Gold

Project Report | May 13, 2021
Stronger Together

By Colleen Eschenburg | Project Leader

Hi everyone,

Thanks for welcoming Mírame into your inbox with a new update!

I’m excited to share that Mírame is organizing it’s first round of women’s empowerment workshops for community leaders-- thanks to the end-of-year donations the program received in December.

With this new infusion, Mírame is collaborating with local female leaders to lead holistic health & wellness workshops for non-profit women professionals.

As pillars of strength, and resources for marginalized communities in Ecuador, we believe that it’s critical that these women of leadership and community service positions tune into and understand their own needs, and how to respond to them. Ultimately, this allows them to continue to serve valuable missions from a place of wellness, instead of burning out and withdrawing from positions of vital community service.

To support this end, Mírame will offer a 7 series workshop on “The Management of Primordial Energy” to 20 Ecuadorian nonprofit women leaders; thanks to collaboration from the cultural center Casa Guacamaya, and Psychologist Andrea Malo.

In this workshop series, these women leaders will explore the “primordial body”, or the centers of the self where vital energy, emotional energy, and creative energy are stored. This experiential learning series is backed by gestalt and transpersonal psychology sciences, and is designed to assist therapists, coaches, teachers and professionals who focus on the well-being and personal development of others to understand, protect and channel their primordial energies for the benefits of integrated mind-body leadership and service.

Last year, a short intensive course was offered as a way to offer self-care exercises during the pandemic, when many nonprofit leaders were hit with an outpouring of new needs to their suffering communities. This workshop received great acclaim, and therefore we’re excited to have the opportunity, not only to re-host the class, but to extend it into a formal 7-session experience.

Outcomes from the class we expect our 20 nonprofit leaders to enjoy this time around are:

The ability to understand the body’s energy signals (emotional, creative, physical.. etc) and how to channel this energy for best-fit-purposes of self-care and community leadership
Access to a roadmap of their own body, that enables them to connect/reconnect with their body’s needs, energy status, and internal capabilities.
A healthy, balanced internal environment from which leaders can serve with clarity, discernment and calm.
A removal of stagnant internal energy for service leaders in strong emotionally and physically demanding positions.
The ability to expand & channel desired energies in a positive fashion.

We’re excited to begin a new adventure for women’s empowerment workshops this year, and would love to keep you posted on results from the workshop. Likewise, there will be more fun to be had this year, so stay tuned for more from Mírame as 2021 progresses.

Many thanks to you and your support for helping women leaders grow stronger in a time of global crisis and transformation. Much love to you and yours.

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Jan 14, 2021
ONE BIG HEART FELT THANK YOU!

By Maria Jose Orellana | Executive Director

Sep 22, 2020
Virtual Pivoting Leads to Excellent Outreach

By Maria Jose Orellana | Executive Director

Hello everyone!

Adjusting to the global pandemic has been a challenge for everyone, and for Mírame it’s been no different. I’m pleased to announce that the program has risen to the occasion and pivoted its services to virtual platforms – with great rewards!

In May, Mírame’s biggest annual project occurred for Respected Childbirth Week. This year, everything about the project changed. Last minute, an online conference between 12 different midwives, obstetricians and birthing professionals was organized. The event was called “Encuentro Parteras De America. Explorando el parto junto a ti.” (An encounter of birthing professionals: Exploring childbirth with you). It spanned 10 different Latin American countries, and received over 11.4k views once live(!). In total, over 120k people interacted with the informational and promotional material hosted online, and at the time of this written report, over 16,000 have watched the online conference!!!

An amazing and unexpected success indeed.

During the 3 hour virtual event, various themes were discussed ranging from (little known) women’s rights in childbirth- such as the right to choose birthing positions, receiving food and water during labor, the right to have a spouse or midwife present during labor, etc. – all the way to esoteric and ancestral understandings of childbirth practices and meaning as a time of extreme transformation, for both mother and child.

The conference was an amazing success, with 547 different people commenting online about their feelings of gratitude for the workshop and personal reflections. One of my favorite comments received was from Alexandra, who said, “What a wonderful encounter of wisdom and love. Thank you for being our voice, and the voice of all the women who give birth each day. Blessings.”

Following such an amazing experience with virtual outreach, Mírame was inspired to provide more digital services with the goal of connecting to a wider range of people searching for emotional support and personal transformation tools during this global pandemic.

In Ecuador, as in many places around the world, government enforced health controls have been extreme, and many people have been forced to stay at home with no option of leaving. Many have lost jobs due to forced employment restrictions, and emotional stressors are on the increase, causing turmoil in the home and in the mind-body connection.

To help met this need, Mírame joined with Fundación Hearts of Gold to host a series of 6 workshops online to help nonprofit leaders, the majority of whom are women, handle the crisis that is striking their own homes and their own mind-body connections, so they can continue to be pillars of strength for their growing, vulnerable communities of need.

6 leaders in self-care volunteered their time to educate local Cuenca community leaders in themes of: Loving the Body through Self Massage, Recommendations of Cohabitation During Quarantine, Removing Stress from the Body with Exercise, Mindfulness and Meditation for Everyday Living, Entrepreneurship During the Pandemic, and 7 Basic Capacities in a Person Simply Alive with Life. So far the self-care workshop series has been a success, with an average of 20 nonprofit leaders tuning in each session.

We look forward to seeing how Mírame continues to evolve during this global pandemic. We’ve been blessed to grow our virtual skills to reach a wider range of audiences and are excited to add online outreach to our service strategy.

Links:

Encuentro Parteras De America. Explorando el parto junto a ti

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