2021 Annual Report

WHO WE ARE

Awamaki is a community-driven social enterprise working in deep collaboration with Quechua artisans. Together we create grassroots programs to support and grow women-led cooperatives through heritage textiles, market access, and sustainable tourism.

Building the financial independence of women is at the core of what we do. We recognize the importance of cultivating opportunities that honor artisans, their families, and their communities, which is why we co-create sustainable tourism opportunities built on respect and reciprocity.

From our training programs to the programs we create, our shared values guide us in every aspect of how we operate.

MESSAGE FROM OUR EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR

Dear Friends and Supporters,

This year has been all about rebuilding and maintaining resilience through the pandemic. And I’m happy to report, we’ve truly begun seeing the light at the end of the tunnel.

With the arrival of vaccinations in Peru, we were able to begin working with and training our artisan cooperatives again. We were thrilled to begin work on a new home collection, with the goal of appealing to customers from our online store, thus opening new markets for our artisan partners. We experimented with new weaving techniques, natural plant dyes, heritage designs, and artisan-hand-spun yarn, all while leading twenty workshops for our artisan partners to equip them with the skills needed to complete this new collection.

To keep widening our horizons, we began partnerships with new platforms that connect ethical producers with stores in the U.S. These new platforms now account for nearly half of our artisan partners’ sales.

Additionally, our tourism program started up again this fall, bringing tours to our tourism cooperatives for the first time in over 18 months. We are optimistic that tourists will continue to return, and we are exploring new partnership ideas as we consider in what ways we can return to tourism with the climate in crisis. We are welcoming volunteers back and getting ready to replace staff positions that have been empty for over a year.

Finally, with your much appreciated support, we have been able to continue with our monthly food basket delivery program throughout the entirety of 2021, ensuring that our 163 artisan partners and their families were fed while they navigated trying to find sources of income during these difficult times.

I am so grateful to you for accompanying us on this long journey, and for trusting us to find our way, experiment and explore so that we can continue to support our partner artisans through shifting needs and circumstances. Thanks to your support, we are coming out of this period stronger, more flexible, more creative, and ready to take on the challenge of rebuilding for a changed world in the coming years.

All my best,

Kennedy Leavens, Executive Director

Workshop Relaunches and Artisan Innovation

In October, our Sustainable Tourism coordinator Melissa wrote, “[It] has been a very productive month. We are feeling like we are almost back to normal, as Mercedes has begun teaching workshops again in the communities of Patacancha.” After a whole year of pandemic lockdown, where we were only able to meet with our partner cooperatives to bring them their monthly food baskets, it felt amazing to get back to the work Awamaki aims to do: training our artisan partners so that they can create their own pathways to success in the tourism industry and international market. And at the end of this year, we are incredibly happy to have completed 20 intensive workshops with three of our cooperatives, involving around 60 of our artisan partners.

The rationale behind this series of workshops is as follows. Until COVID, most of our customers were tourists in Peru, and we didn't sell very much online in the U.S. Tourists in Peru, who bought from us and directly from the artisans, always loved naturally-dyed yarn and traditional Andean motifs in our artisan partners' textiles. Each of those textiles were unique and only sold in Peru. In the U.S., we had historically only sold items with designs that blended Andean and modern styles. We had always gotten a lot of requests for this type of traditional Andean design in our online store, but we had never had the ability to create something traditional that we could produce at scale, which is necessary to sell online. Now, with your support, we are excited to be doing that for the first time; we spent the majority of 2021 focused on developing a collection of home items with beautiful traditional Andean motifs.For this collection, we worked with the artisans to create a very traditional Andean design in a contemporary product shape. We created a throw blanket and a collection of pillows, but the star of the show is a very long lumbar pillow that incorporates traditional embroidery/stitching, as well as traditional designs.

This new line came together through a series of workshops, led by our Head of Women's Artisan Cooperatives, Mercedes Durand. The design workshops emphasized the artisans’ design skills, examined their own designs, and taught techniques for using their designs in textiles for export. Mercedes also covered color theory, quality control, following patterns, details and finishing, and natural dye techniques. The workshop series also included a thorough explanation of the

sales channels where the artisans' products are sold, and the role of photography in internet sales, including how images of the artisans and their products can be used, and the importance of consent for visual representation.

"I feel very satisfied sharing this information with the artisans," said Mercedes, "At the same time, I am happy because many of the concepts will serve them well in their personal development too, like personal finance,"

Another exciting aspect of our return to workshops and trainings is the sheer amount of innovation that these trainings founded. In order to create an authentic product with andean inspired design for our online store, we had to get creative. For example, one innovation that has come out of this process is that for the first time, we have been able to turn to our cooperatives to source alpaca fleece from their own animals. Previously we bought fleece from other regions. The village of Kelkanca, our most remote partner village, has always raised alpaca but never with enough fleece or enough quality fleece for us to be able to buy from them. Due to recent improvements they have made, this year we were able to buy fleece from our artisan partners there, and keep those funds in the village. In another creative restructuring, we then took that fleece directly to our partner cooperatives in Huilloc to spin into a chunky yarn. We then took that yarn to the Awac Phuna cooperative in Patacancha, or back to Kelkanca, where we dyed it using natural dyes (another technique we haven’t been able to practice on such a big scale until now).

Possibly our favorite departure from our past chain of production is that we were able to work directly with our artisan partners to support their leadership with the pillow designs. Typically when we design a product to sell in the U.S., our Mexican-American-Peruvian (at heart) designer takes the lead and works with the artisans to incorporate their designs into a contemporary piece that is more popular in the U.S. With this piece, we worked with the artisans in the trainings to explain design principles, and we asked them to create samples based

on examples and ideas, rather than explicit instructions. We have always worked closely with the artisans in the design process, but for this project we asked them to come up with the final designs.

Once they settled on their final designs, the artisans then wove the locally-sourced yarn into either pillows or blankets as the final product. This was also innovative because the artisans typically work with finer sheeps-wool yarn for weaving, so they had to adapt to using the chunkier alpaca yarn as their medium.

Your support for this project has been crucial. We are so grateful to you, not only for helping us bring a new product to market that will give our artisan partners a new sales channel, but also for trusting us to find a new way to do this. We are doing so many things we have never done before, which is helping our artisans build new skills and learn a new style of design collaboration. We know this home collection will be stunning and we are excited to bring you along.

Food Basket Program Continues

2021 was a year defined, for all of us, by the need to be constantly adapting to the twists and turns of this pandemic. Luckily for our Peruvian employees and partners, the government began rolling out vaccines across the country. However, as the new variant entered Peru, cases in the Cusco region spiked, leading to even tighter restrictions, like double masks and face shields required in public spaces. The consequences of COVID in our artisan partners’ communities are still dire; if anyone feels ill or needs medical assistance, it does not exist in their villages. There is a government clinic in town but it only has 1 doctor available and emergency cases must go to Cusco which is an hour and a half by bus from Ollantaytambo. Additionally, getting a test for Covid-19 is only available Tuesdays and Thursdays from 9am to 11am.

However, with vaccinations becoming available in other countries as well, the borders have become more flexible and this means more people coming into Ollantaytambo. There is a lot of confusion and mistrust in seeing tourists back in Ollantaytambo.

While this brings hope to our artisan partners and gives them light, they are still very scared of going back to “normal.” Some of them will venture into the markets and sell their product, but what they earn is not nearly as much as they used to.

For all of these reasons, we continue to be dedicated to providing our artisans with stability and relief in the form of our monthly food baskets. Like last year, we have drawn upon our strong network, including all of our generous donors, to provide each of our 163 artisan partners’ families with baskets full of vegetables and grains to help everyone in our five partner communities build a strong immunity system. That means that, since March of 2020 when we began this program, we have distributed 3586 food baskets in our monthly food distribution, and we are committed to extending the program through next spring, or as long as needed.

We once again thank you all for your endless support, and your willingness to support such a departure from our normal work as we continue figuring out how to get through this pandemic together. We know how much compassion and heart you have for our work and our artisans, and that knowledge buoys us and our artisan partners.

DATA DASHBOARD: Food Baskets

163 Women

522 Children Supported

3 Indigenous Communities

12 Months of Food Deliveries

1956 Total Baskets Delivered

FINANCIAL STATEMENTS

STATEMENT OF PROFIT AND LOSS

STATEMENT OF FINANCIAL POSITION

Note on financial statements: The Asociacion Civil Awamaki is a Peruvian non-profit civil association responsible for carrying out women’s empowerment programs in Peru. These statements do not include the financial activity of Awamaki U.S., our partner organization that is a 501(c)(3) in the United States.

STAFF & BOARD OF DIRECTORS

AWAMAKI STAFF

Kennedy Leavens, Executive Director

Yovana Candela, Director of Operations

Mercedes Durand, Head of Women's Artisan Cooperatives

Melissa Tola, Sustainable Tourism Coordinator

Martha Zuniga, Production Coordinator

Mandish Kalsi, Sales Coordinator

Alejandra Carrillo-Muñoz, Head Designer

AWAMAKI BOARD OF DIRECTORS

Annemarie Toccket

Ladd Leavens

Kramer Gillin

Tom Weeks

Jessica Younker

Kennedy Leavens

Kristen Clark, CPA

Quincy Anderson

HOW TO GET INVOLVED SUPPORT OUR WORK

Awamaki is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization. Donations can be made online at www. awamaki.org/pages/donate.

SHOP OR VISIT SUSTAINABLY

Support our artisan partners by shopping for our ethically handcrafted accessories grounded in traditional Andean textile techniques at www.awamaki.org/collections/all.

Carry our fair trade handcrafted products by becoming a retail partner. Learn more at www.awamaki.org/pages/wholesale.

Travel with us by booking a sustainable tour at www.awamaki.org/pages/sustainable-tourism.

VOLUNTEER WITH US

Learn more about our volunteer program at www.awamaki.org/pages/volunteer or contact us at info@awamaki.org to learn more about how you can be a part of Awamaki.

FOLLOW US

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