Guatemalan womanÂ’s co-op teams with TCU students
During a trip to Guatemala in 2008, TCU Professor Garry Bruton had a chance run-in with a cooperative women’s business named the Associacion Chajulense de Mujeras. The Associacion’s $1,000 in annual earnings and its 50 members who take home a few dollars a week are a lifeline to the city of Chajul – a lifeline that was about to go under.
Though Bruton, a director at TCUÂ’s Neeley School of Business, knew many charitable groups might be willing to help the Associacion, what they really needed was help from a group with a business background.
And Bruton knew just the group to call on.
“It was a very short turnaround since I was [in Guatemala] in August, but I came back and we came up with a class and a few months later, there were 11 master’s students heading to Guatemala,” Bruton said. “It was a wonderful thing to see.”
The first of its kind at TCU and different than most run-of-the-mill study abroad options for Master of Business Administration programs, TCU opened its social entrepreneurship in Guatemala, a three-hour study abroad class that brought new meaning to ‘hands on.’
Eleven current students, a former student plus Bruton and another TCU staff member flew to Guatemala City on Dec. 17, 2008, caught an 11-hour bus ride into the Guatemalan mountains to the small community of Chajul and met their challenge: a women’s co-op that sells hand-woven textiles and has until June to improve their sales, or else their group – and livelihood – will shut down.
“It’s a real life problem,” Bruton said. “A lot of MBA trips go to countries, China and whatnot, but this was a chance to use business ideas to help solve social problems. These people in Chajul live on less than a dollar a day. These women may spend 15 to 20 hours making something and sell it for $10. But if this co-op ceases to exist, it’s not just a business failure; the repercussions are severe in that region.”
The Associacion produces an array of textiles from purses and scarves to place mats and table runners. The co-op members donÂ’t work set schedules, but instead make the products at home and at the co-opÂ’s office in their spare time throughout each week.
The looms the women use to weave the textiles are back looms, a portable, but time consuming and costly method compared to using a foot loom, a newer machine that would save time and improve productivity, but also a heavy machine that must be stored in a central location. Kendra Stevens, a graduate student and a full-time nurse, said the foot loom would require the women to go to work instead of being able to weave fabric with the back loom in between making meals and taking care of their children.
“By recommending a switch from back looms to foot looms we’re essentially changing a culture by asking a whole community of women to become working mothers as opposed to stay-at home moms,” Stevens said. “This is a drastic change to their way of life, but the women are so destitute that they are eager to provide for their families, regardless of the
cost – even if that cost is changing their
culture.”
Bruton said the graduate students will solve a two-fold problem through the class: work quickly to make contacts with United States buyers to pump cash into the Associacion, which would solve its immediate problem; and help the women to create a sustainable business plan that they can maintain internally to ensure the co-opÂ’s long-term success.
Paula Rodriguez has served as a voluntary adviser to the co-op since 2004, trying to help the business survive. Since her start, Rodriguez said she has seen vast improvements in the character and leadership skills of the women, but the TCU program has provided something new: hope.
“It is valuable for the students to see this kind of reality. Chajul is one of the poorest areas in Guatemala, but the women work hard,” Rodriguez said. “And for our women, it is a great thing because they have seen students come to help and do something for the program and that gives them a little bit of hope that the program might not close.”
On their trip, which spanned seven days, TCU students worked with co-op members in Chajul, went to Antigua for a day and spent a day in class hearing lectures about solutions to poverty at the Francisco Marroquin University.
Though the trip was extensive, Bruton said it was only the starting point for the social entrepreneurship in Guatemala program. The real work started when students returned home and started drawing on their sales and marketing skills to help increase the AssociacionÂ’s sales volume.
“I was taken aback by how basic the skills they needed were,” said George Montague, TCU MBA student and a former investment management professional. “We really learned to distill our business skills down to the simplest form and build up.”
Students have now divided into teams to tackle marketing and export details for the Associacion – most of which is done in the students’ spare time.
As an unexpected part of the program, one of the graduate students came up with the idea of extending the Guatemala program into another class: one that deals with sustainability.
Megan Davis, a professional MBA student and full-time Burlington Northern Santa Fe Railway senior manager, said she started thinking about an extended class for the Guatemala project before she ever went.
“It would have been very easy for our group to go into Chajul, bring back some samples, and find a few buyers in the Dallas-Fort Worth area to purchase some of these products. What bothered me with that was the sustainability issue; ‘Give a man a fish and he will eat for a day. Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime,’” Davis said.
Even after solving the immediate problem, Davis said she and other students were afraid of what might happen to the co-op if it were dependant on the students for long-term success.
“While our first objective is to help increase their volume of sales so that they can survive temporarily, the long-term objective is to teach the women the basic business skills and communication channels they need so that they can continue on their own, and survive,” she said.
Bruton is serving as adviser for the extended class, which could be taken as a 1.5-hour or 3-hour class.
“These students came back with some great ideas and they are passionate about the program,” Bruton said. “… And they now have a good sense of how business skills can be applied to solve social problems, which is something that could blossom into something huge.”
EditorÂ’s note: Fort Worth Business Press Managing Editor Crystal Forester is in the professional MBA program at TCU and went on the Guatemala trip.
