Needed in 2 hours!! Make into power point

This year’s theme,  “We Got You! Strengthening Safety for Survivors,” highlights the power of community-driven solutions in sustaining culturally specific programs. We invite proposals that reflect lived expertise, honor cultural traditions, and offer practical tools for long-term impact. The Institute uplifts grantees as experts and provides a platform to showcase their leadership

RFP link

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Title:

Healing in Action through Non-traditional Approaches: Artesanando, an Economic Justice Model for Survivors.

Abstract

We recognized the gaps in the culturally specific services that are available for Latinx survivors and developed an economic justice model that is directly informed by our client base. Our clients must work outside the formal economy to earn income for their families and our Artesanando project supports the development of businesses selling homemade foods and handicrafts. This initiative empowers by integrating cultural traditions, economic justice, and communal support. Through art, entrepreneurship, and mentorship, our initiative fosters healing and financial independence, demonstrating the power of solidarity economies in building long-term safety and resilience.

Outcomes

Workshop participants will leave the session inspired and equipped with ideas for culturally responsive programming that address community needs, using the tenets of the solidarity economy as liberatory alternatives to conventional systems for economic stability.

We will examine applied principles from the solidarity economy which we use in the program: equity, pay scales, cooperative collectives, time banking, mutuality, group learning, and self-employment.

We will explore the challenges to build businesses to scale, explore the barriers to stability for immigrant survivors, and highlight the positive impact our programing has on our clients’ lives, physically, spiritually and emotionally.

Description of Artesanando Project

The Economic Justice Program works with survivors of domestic and sexual abuse and other gender-based violence. Often, the models developed by mainstream domestic violence and other service organizations do not adequately address the unique needs of the Latinx immigrant community. At EJP, we strive to support the most marginalized Latinx survivors who cannot access mainstream services due to status, language proficiency, and educational level. VIP recognizes the gaps in the culturally specific services that are available for survivors, and effectively combined culture, values and theory into a comprehensive program appropriate for Latinx community members.   

We have developed an economic justice model that is directly informed by our client base. Survivors with mixed status are forced to look for ways outside the formal economy to earn income for their families. One of our primary initiatives is around business development and entrepreneurship with the program ArteSanando. Many of the survivors we work with are in the process of developing a business by selling homemade food and handcrafted items.  

This includes the following outcomes: 

Phase 1: Reflection: Creates intentional spaces to raise consciousness about the intersectionality of poverty, immigration and their impact on finances for survivors.   

Phase 2. Empowered Learning: Provides basic information about finances and financial management.

Phase 3. Exploring Basic Entrepreneurship and Technical Skills: This includes business development coaching, including marketing, administration, online and handcrafting skills.  

Phase 4. Community and Social Action: Connecting services and products with the community where both the seller and the buyer are involved in building foundations of a solidarity economy.   

Phase 5. Mentorship: Survivors are connected to incoming members of the following cohort to mentor them during the business development process, sharing tips and supporting other survivors in their healing process.   

 

Our goal is to build vendor capacity for scale and increased clientele. This spring we will invite the Artesanando cohort to participate in a Pop-up Market to present their inventory and feed the community with their specialties. Others will continue onto be featured at VIP’s 40th anniversary benefit as sellers, caterers, and designers.   

  Review other ways of supporting survivors via Solidarity Economy Model for Collective Impact: https://prezi.com/view/1RxaKucAjaU5MnfQDybC/

-uplifts culture, art,language, and artisan talent

-builds community support, power, and equity

-clips of clients speaking

-breakout rooms on ways to apply solidarity economy to own lives/work

-challenges

-impact

NE Title Slide

Artesanando: Crafting Safety, Healing, and Economic Justice for Survivors Healing in Action through Non-traditional Approaches Presented by: Michelle PM and Isleidy EJA from VIP OVW Grantee Institute | 2025 Theme: “We Got You! Strengthening Safety for Survivors”

The Problem Addressed

· Economic dependence is one of the main reasons survivors remain in abusive relationships. For immigrant women, this is intensified by factors like language barriers, work authorization status, discrimination, and systemic marginalization.

· Our work addresses this by asking: How can economic empowerment initiatives also be a space for safety, healing, and consciousness?

· Our framework is grounded in the idea that safety isn’t just about escaping harm—it’s also about building the conditions for healing, creative resourcefulness, and economic autonomy.

· Economic Abuse & Barriers: For immigrant survivors, even when they escape the abuse, barriers to stability remain. These include legal vulnerabilities, lack of access to formal employment, limited social networks, and lack of culturally and linguistically responsive services.

· We saw the need to create a model that didn’t just meet survivors where they were—but honored and leveraged their existing skills and cultural strengths.

What is Artesanando?

Artesanando means literally “making by hand” and “healing.” But it is also a metaphor for the process of reweaving lives after violence. It’s a project that emerged from a survivor-led process to create sustainable economic opportunities rooted in food, textiles, and other cultural practices: a co-created economic justice initiative where survivors lead, own, and benefit from the work.

· Latinx immigrant survivors often navigate limited economic options due to immigration status, informal labor, and systemic barriers.

· Many are excluded from traditional services and employment.

· Artesanando arose from community listening and the recognition that healing and safety must include economic justice.

· Our project uses cultural entrepreneurship, peer mentorship, and mutual aid to foster empowerment and dignity.

· Artesanando includes several interwoven components:

· Skill-building workshops in cooking, baking, sewing, and other traditional arts

· Popular education on economic rights, cooperative structures, pricing, and marketing.

· Business incubator support for launching and sustaining microenterprises.

· Healing circles that center the trauma and resilience of survivors. *

· Trainings in marketing, pricing, production, presentation, and storytelling

· Political education around labor rights, gender justice, and economic systems

· Partnerships with community orgs, social enterprise incubators, and mutual aid collectives

These components complement and build on each other to create a holistic safety net.

Program Design: Building a Mutual Aid Model (process by which programming was born and has evolved)

1. Assess Needs & Build Trust

a. Confidential conversations, cultural sensitivity, language access.

b. Community-led needs assessments and surveys.

2. Form a Cohort

a. Survivors, cultural workers, and advocates.

b. Clearly defined, collaborative roles.

3. Establish Key Principles

a. Safety, confidentiality, non-hierarchy, and mutual empowerment.

b. Teaching new possibilities with solidarity economy models for community building

4. Ongoing Evaluation Practices:

a. Surveys

Our Approach to Economic Justice

Ways to integrate Solidarity Economy practices:

We use trauma-informed, culturally relevant approaches. We ensure that all classes, from business workshops to craft trainings, integrates healing and mutual support. We center the expertise of survivors, not just as participants, but as leaders and facilitators in the program.

· Cooperatives: Shared decision-making, collective ownership.

· Mutual Aid: Emergency support funds, in-kind donations, resource sharing.

· Skill-building & Microenterprise: Empowering through self-employment.

· Cultural Production: Handcrafts and food rooted in cultural traditions.

These aren’t just strategies—they’re values that push back against systems that devalue immigrant labor and culture

Healing Through Creation

· Artesanando centers creative practice and collective learning as healing.

· Workshops on traditional food-making, embroidery, natural skin care, candles, and soap.

· Group reflection circles accompany craft sessions to rebuild trust and self-worth.

· Art is therapy, income, and identity—not just a product. We are attempting to uplift their whole self which has had to fracture or hide to exist within harmful systems and interpersonal relationships.

BREAKOUT – Envisioning Economic Justice 15 mins

In breakout groups, take 10 minutes to reflect on the following questions:

1. What does economic justice mean to you and your community?

2. What barriers do survivors face in accessing economic power in your setting?

3. What would a survivor-centered economy look like?

Spend 10 minutes in groups and then 5 minutes sharing back. Feel free to write or draw your answers, and designate someone to share one key insight when we return

Survivor Leadership at the Core A core tenet of our work is survivor leadership. Every decision—whether about products, pricing, or policies—is made with and by survivors.

· We honor lived experience as a form of expertise. That means we don’t “empower” survivors—they already have power. We just help understand the barriers that keep that power from flourishing.

· Survivors are artisans, healers, cooks, caregivers, visionaries. Artesanando gives space for those gifts to be seen, valued, and nurtured.

Entrepreneurship as Liberation

· We support survivors to develop small, informal businesses:

· Food stands, pop-up markets, online craft sales, and opportunities with partner organizations across the city. We plan to connect with local shops and restaurants in key areas of the city after mapping resources in these hubs.

· Use of community, connections, shared tools, mentorship.

· Focus on low-barrier entry and peer-to-peer learning. Everyone is at differing levels when they join our cohort and can drop in and out as needed to accommodate their lives.

· Future steps are to co-create fair pay scales and shared investment practices, create a collective website and social media. Will be rolling out later this year ideally.

· Extend the partnerships to local co-ops nyc solidarity map

From Crisis to

Survivors in Artesanando often start with what they already know—traditional recipes, embroidery patterns, herbal remedies passed down through generations.

We work with survivors to co-create culturally-rooted business ideas, such as:

· Tamale and pupusa pop-ups

· Natural bath and body products using traditional herbs

· Embroidered accessories and home goods

These aren’t just businesses—they’re spaces to foment cultural memory and identity.

Practices of Mutual Care

· Weekly check-ins and peer support groups, as well as ongoing chats for resource sharing and planning

· Care workshops to discuss financial trauma, boundary-setting, joy practices. Planning a group grounding session led by one of our own who runs temascal sessions (Mexican indigenous practice, opening 4 doors and cleansing energy)- wants to bring that essence to our workshop.

· Emphasis on healing justice and community accountability- they check in with each other, walk each other home, pass on children’s clothes, support each others’ social media.

· “Antes me sentía invisible. Ahora, tengo algo que ofrecer. Tengo una comunidad que me ve.” “Before, I felt invisible. Now, I have something to offer. I have a community that sees me.”- This is the essence of Artesanando—recognition, belonging, and possibility.

Evolving With the Community

· Regular reflection and participant feedback shape program design.

· We adapt based on emerging needs: some ideas are:

· The program is never static—it grows with us.

· Example:

Solidarity Economy in Practice

· Integration of alternative economic models

· Encouraging self-determination, not dependency.

BREAKOUT – Action Steps 10 mins

1. What’s one way you could incorporate a solidarity economy approach in your organization or personal life?

2. What support, relationships, or resources would you need to make that happen?

3. How can you center survivor leadership in that effort?

Lessons Learned and Reflections:

Many iterations of this programming over the years has taught us:

· Economic empowerment must be rooted in cultural relevance and collective models for sustainability

· We must validate the tension between urgency for income and the slow process of healing and trust-building

· That healing and business are not separate—they can be mutually reinforcing with the underlying intentionality to build not extract

· Survivor-led design is not just ethical—it’s essential. We also learned to be flexible, listen deeply, and center relationships over outcomes. Because of their circumstances, it is not uncommon for survivors to pause their entrepreneurial goals to focus on issues with children, DV-related court cases etc..

Successes We Celebrate (more numbers on impact coming from Adio)

· 40+ women launched their first microbusinesses since 2023

· 80% reported greater financial independence, over 90% achieved their goals when joining the program

· 95% say they feel “part of a community”

· Survivor quote: “Aquí encontré no solo trabajo, sino mi voz.”

· Ongoing ripple effects: children learning from their mothers as they attend workshops/witness their resilience, new leaders emerging.

· Longevity: Clients either move on with more stability and knowledge or return to deepen their learning and be part of community

· Others have joined or formed cooperatives to reduce isolation and build shared wealth. But beyond numbers, the most powerful outcomes are in the stories: women saying “I feel safe,” “I have somethng that is mine,” or “I’m not alone anymore.”

What You Can Do Breakout Discussion:

**Handout

**Pictures from past market, workshops, opportunities ie. Gala, their products

**Resources for them to dig deeper

**ADD slide on economic justice

**Do we provide a list of workshop topics we provide?