In partnership with the Federación de Mujeres de Sucumbíos (FMS), we’re expanding access to transformative trauma healing for women in the Ecuadorian province of Sucumbíos. This new collaboration builds upon our original pilot program: using story cloths (arpilleras) as part of an integrative trauma healing approach and accompanying women from victims to survivors to agents of change.
Statistics
Background
About 200 miles east of Quito, in the Amazon Basin, Sucumbíos province is home to over 175 thousand people. For decades the oil industry’s extractive practices have violated the ecosystem, exploited workers, and disrupted communities. This cascade of systemic violence and forced displacement has particularly affected women.
In recent years, the escalation of violence related to narco-trafficking, theft of indigenous land, and conflicts in Colombia and Venezuela has made the need for trauma healing even more acute.
Our Partner
The Federación de Mujeres de Sucumbíos (Women’s Federation of Sucumbíos) is a collective of over 100 grassroot groups that have organized to provide protection and care for survivors that is so acutely needed.
Our Work Then
Common Threads Project was first piloted in 2012 in Lago Agrio, Ecuador. In partnership with the Federación de Mujeres de Sucumbíos, we worked with FMS to train local facilitators and adapt the intervention for use in their communities.
The two pilot circles demonstrated a significant reduction of mental health symptoms and increased coping capacity. The women found it to be a transformative, healing experience, and they asked to continue their participation into an additional phase of sessions. Some members of the original groups continued to meet, sew, and provide ongoing peer support for one another.
In the years since our initial collaboration, FMS has brought arpilleras into all aspects of their advocacy work.
“In FMS, we like to think about arpilleras as the seed that allowed a possibility of transformation for all women … The seed has grown thanks to the care that women from FMS gave it. It has spread out and now reaches the public space.”
Our Work Now
In 2023, we trained 14 FMS facilitators in the Common Threads methodology. They bring clinical expertise, creativity, lived experience of trauma, and indigenous healing practices to this work.
The new program brings together groups of women in healing circles in Sucumbíos. Participants include migrant women from Colombia and Venezuela, Ecuadorian women, and survivor-activists who are part of the FMS network.
As facilitators gain expertise and experience in the intervention, FMS will begin to develop into a Center of Excellence in the region.
“This experience feels very deep in the body and in the emotions. It has been
very exciting for me to remember the power of art and take it back to clinical practice. Knowing each other fills me with joy, strengthening the conviction that we can come together to embroider better worlds.”
View Story Cloths from Ecuador
