Sarah Schwid and Melissa Summers
11:00-12:00pm PST. To watch this presentation live please click here.
In January of 2011, 13 MIIS students from each of the program fields traveled to the coastal Bajo Lempa region of El Salvador to work with Team El Salvador’s partner organizations, La Coordinadora and Asociación Mangle, to implement development projects in the region’s local communities. The region faces many challenges including annual flooding, drought, job loss, and poverty. However, the Bajo Lempa region is also rich in both agricultural and marine based natural resources.
In its fifth year of operation, Team El Salvador and its partner organizations focused on three projects aimed at mitigating some of the challenges faced by the communities in the area: 1) Production: Agriculture, 2) Infrastructure: Waste Management, and 3) Environment: Community Eco-Tourism. This presentation will discuss how the projects are aiding in finding income generating alternatives as well as alternative models of community organization, which foster democratic and sustainable models of pooling resources and collaborating for the avancement of the communities.
