By selling bracelets for the past month, members of the Mano en Mano club helped support Central American artists.
Headed by advisers Kimberly Ponce de Leon and Brian Berger, the Mano en Mano club strives to create a relationship between Shaker students and the Hispanic community in Cleveland.
For the past month, the club has met every first period in the Eli Gallery to sell hand-made pulseras to raise money for creators in Guatemala and Nicaragua via the Pulsera Project. The project started in 2009 on the values of fair trade, empowering Central American communities, leadership, education, and getting U.S. students involved in supporting the communities. The organization buys “pulseras” or bracelets from more than 200 artisans within Central America and then partners with U.S. schools to sell them.
Ponce de Leon, who teaches Spanish, said the bracelets are sold for $5, which is a fair-trade price upheld by the Pulsera project. “The minimum wage for Guatemalans is $1 an hour, so $5 to American citizens may not seem like much, but it’s a lot of money for them,” she said. All revenue from the U.S. sales returns to the artisans’ countries and is used to fund schooling, housing, healthcare and organizations that benefit Central American communities.
“It doesn’t necessarily go back to the person who made it, but back to the community where that person is from,” Ponce de Leon said.
Cora Bissett, a Mano en Mano member, helped staff the table during first period Dec. 12, the last day of the Pulsera Project at SHHS. “We started this right before [Thanksgiving] break,” she said. “After this, this box and the kit of bracelets will be sent to the next [school].”
The organization is a non-profit with more than 4,000 schools collaborating with the project and more than $6 million raised. Nonprofit organizations are experiencing budget cuts this year as the federal government withholds funding. “The Pulsera Project is a national nonprofit corporation and it’s very thinly staffed this year,” Ponce de Leon said.
Mano en Mano participates in the Pulsera Project every year as a service learning project. “We have the sale annually and we usually do it around this time of year, like at the beginning of December,” Ponce de Leon said. “When you have resources, it’s a generous and noble thing to give back to others.”
