Fair Trade Fashion and Design

Mapuche women of the Chol Chol Foundation

The Chol Chol Foundation is a non-profit fair trade organization that promotes sustainable economic development for rural Mapuche women – weavers – from the Araucania region in Chile. In these rural communities, only 3% of adults have more than a high school education, women making up a small portion of this group. While Chile has undergone drastic development throughout the past few decades, the Mapuche people remain a marginalized sector of Chilean society. Mapuche women are rarely presented with economic opportunities or education to develop professionally or creatively within their rural communities.

Auracanian Mapuche family

When James Mundell first established the Chol Chol Foundation in 1974, the foundation believed that the way to help Mapuche communities out of poverty was through helping the heads of households – men – prosper. However, when the organization began working instead with women in the early 90’s, it soon realized that wealth filtered more productively through a community if it was distributed through the women.  Mothers invested their income on long-term growth for their families. The Chol Chol foundation began to see marked results for the level of comfort and educational development in the Mapuche communities where it worked.

Mapuche family weaving at home

The majority of the women involved have found empowerment in their roles as successful artisans and financial contributors to their families. The family dynamics in an often patriarchal culture have become largely more positive as our weavers became providers.  The weaving work imbues them with new found power and self-confidence in their communities. Meanwhile, the practice of weaving protects the cultural transmission of Mapuche craft techniques, design traditions, and the symbolic language embedded in the textiles.

Mapuche woman weaving with son

Today the Chol Chol Foundation acts in several ways to facilitate the weavers’ access to materials and markets. First, it is similar to a micro-finance organization in that it lends raw wool to weavers who cannot afford material costs. Once the goods have been produced, it acts as a non-profit intermediary between the artisans and the market to help them connect to consumers. Weavers are paid for their work independently of whether or not the organization can sell them, thus insuring the well being of the artisans. Meanwhile the Chol Chol Foundation acts as a commercial interface for the women in difficult areas considering the lack of technology in their rural communities. The Foundation organizes and sends orders, handles incoming requests in various languages, and maintains a website and catalog of the women’s work. As a result, the foundation provides stable incomes for many families while helping protecting Mapuche culture.  The greatest success however is that women work from home, and raise their children in their own communities. Their children will grow up Mapuche with access to education, comfort and their cultural identity.

Mapuche son accompanies his mother while she weaves