Growing up in the 80’s, it was common to inherit clothes from your older siblings or swap clothes with your cousins. Fashion and design was not such a big thing back then and wearing the same shirt more than five times was definitely not frowned upon. Today we’re looking at a new, and quite frankly… View more
Yabal is more than a textile business, we are a social enterprise! This means that the WHY of what we do is based on helping our partner communities thrive! This includes providing fair trade jobs to women weavers, educational scholarships to their children, maternity leave for weavers, and most recently, food security projects like this year’s Women’s Garden Program! The idea for the Garden… View more
To celebrate our work together in 2019 Yabal took our 41 backstrap loom weavers to the Xetulul amusement park, in Retalhuleu, Guatemala. The park is a major tourist destination about 2 hours from their community and is similar to Disney Land. Tourists from all over Central America travel to Guatemala just to visit this the… View more
Yabal’s women weavers in the rural Guatemalan communities of Pacutama and Chuicutama dream of giving their kids something that they never had- an education. Education is the hope they have for their children to escape poverty and have more options than they themselves had. But education, as all things in Guatemala, has a cost, which is… View more
As part of this year’s oyster mushroom cultivation program with Yabal’s women weavers in Santa Catarina Ixtahuacan, Yabal offered a cooking workshop to give the women new ideas of how to incorporate this nutritious and delicious food into their daily diet. Oyster mushrooms are high in protein, iron, zinc, potassium, folic acid, B vitamins, vitamin… View more
El dia de los santos (Nov. 1) and dia de los muertos (Nov. 2), All Saints Day and Day of the Dead, are one of our favorite holidays in Guatemala. In contrast to Halloween, celebrated during the same time in the US, Day of the Dead is one of the most important family holidays of… View more
What do mushrooms and weaving have in common? They’re both great income-generating projects for women in Guatemala! And projects that Yabal supports in our Guatemalan artisan communities. While we’ve had our Yabal weaving brand for over 10 years now, oyster mushroom cultivation is a newer project. The mission of Yabal is to support the economic… View more
above photo credit: Caroline Lindsell This year, Yabal began a new relationship with the artisan cooperative in Chichicastenango, called Utz Batz. They are a group of 10-15 women weavers that have worked together since 2008 as a fair trade artisan cooperative in order to create jobs for themselves. The town of Chichicastenango is famous with… View more
“When we moved to this area [in 2005 after Hurricane Stan] most of the trees in this forest had been cut by other communities living here. Those of us families from Chuicutama living here at the time decided to buy 300 acres of this mountain and re-plant trees so that our children would have a forest… View more
We had the pleasure recently to welcome doctor Kate Colwell to our women’s cooperative meeting in Pactuama, Santa Catarina Ixtahuacan. Kate specializes in helping artisans with healthy body dynamics, posture, self-care, and injury prevention. It was an important workshop to have with our group of 40 weavers and a great first introduction to the idea… View more
