Volunteer Stories
Kristen Gartland
Guatemala
Farmer-to-Farmer Caribbean Region
This article was originally written and published by Partners of the Americas here.
Photo Credit to Cited Implementing Partner or Cited Entity
Name: Kristen Gartland
Current title/profession: Implementation Consultant at Vivial
Current hometown: Dayton, Ohio
Areas of expertise: Communications, presentation platforms
ASSIGNMENT OVERVIEW
Name of project: Farmer-to-Farmer Caribbean Region
Location of the project: Guatemala
Organization that sent the volunteer: Partners of the Americas
VOLUNTEER IMPACT
Kristen Gartland traveled to Guatemala as an F2F volunteer for 2 weeks in March 2018 to assist CEPROCAL with their marketing strategies. CEPROCAL is the Center for Goat Production in the Altiplano of Guatemala. CEPROCAL was initially founded by Save the Children. It is funded by Save the Children, USAID, Agros and Keurig Green Mountain.
CEPROCAL’s focus is to fight malnutrition in the Ixil area (Quiché). They do this by providing a female goat to a family in need, then breeding that goat with one of their male goats. Once the female goat has kids, the family who received the goat becomes responsible for donating a goat to another family in need. This process has helped over 30 families so far. When products are purchased from CEPROCAL it gives them the funds they need to continue these services.
Kristen spent 3 days at CEPROCAL, learning more about the company and the employees who work there. She took photos for the website and was taught about how the products are made and the processes for artificial goat insemination. This gave her more insight on the company and content to put on the website.
The highlight of Kristen’s trip was visiting a small village in Nebaj where a family had profited from CEPROCAL’s goat donation program. It allowed her to see that CEPROCAL really does alleviate some struggles for the community. She could also see how greatful the family was for the donation.
Kristen spent the next few days working on creating the website and social media channels along with training documents to go along with each channel. The next week, she spent 3 days working at the Save the Children office in Guatemala City. During this time she taught 2 employees of Save the Children and one employee of Agros how to manage the website and social media channels. She also provided them with other tools to utilize to ease the workload of digital marketing.