Summertown, Tennessee, USA

Plenty USA

After local efforts to help rural counties mend from tornadoes and hurricanes, Plenty jumped into international development heart first, responding to the Guatemalan earthquake in 1976, which killed over 20,000 people. The Farm sent some 200 midwives, medics, and carpenters to care for Mayan villagers and rebuild thousands of homes, schools, municipal buildings and water systems with earthquake-resistant designs. Plenty learned from that experience what real development is about--helping people directly, in the way they most want to be helped.

Over it's 20 year history, Plenty's work has spanned a wide range of activities, from disaster relief to alternate energy, from micro-enterprise development to reforestation, from primary health care training in Lesotho, Southern Africa and Washington, D.C. to building a model ecovillage in Russia. From potable water for rural villages in Guatemala to community-based agriculture at the Pine Ridge reservation in South Dakota and Round Valley reservation in Northern California.

The DeColores Fair Trade Center in Davis, California is a Plenty-owned retail store selling arts and crafts from many of the projects Plenty works with. DeColores provides the native producers more of the profits so they can develop their communities with local autonomy. In this way, Plenty has empowered more than 120 women's co-ops with economic independence in Chiapas, Mexico and in Guatemala.

Plenty's free, volunteer ambulance service and paramedic training program in the South Bronx received the Jefferson Award for community service. Plenty also shared in the first Right Livelihood Award in Stockholm in 1980. Two Plenty produced videotapes--Wiping the Tears and the Peyote Road--have won numerous film documentary honors.

Plenty also sponsors a number of active environmental programs in North America. The Natural Rights Center, which is headquartered at The Farm, and the Environmental Resource Center, of Portland, Oregon, maintain active litigation in support of a number of local and national initiatives, including storage of nuclear waste, treaties on global climate change, deepwell injection, nuclear disarmament, endangered species, judicial reform, recycling, carrying capacity, EMP/ELF, wetlands, Nuclear Winter, forest conservation and more.

In 1984 Plenty was approached by a group of Mayan community leaders from Guatemala for assistance. They were attempting to rebuild their economies after the devastating military oppression of 1981-1984. They were hoping Plenty could help them to expand their traditional textile industry as practiced by women, now mostly widows, throughout the Guatemalan highlands.

As a direct result of their appeal Plenty founded the "One World Trading Company" (OWTC) and began to develop the potentially lucrative North American market for Mayan goods. The small catalog company grew rapidly from 1985 to 1990 as its Mayan partner mobilized ever more weaving cooperatives and established a sewing factory in Guatemala City and Mayan tailors improved their skills.

To this end, Plenty has founded IWED - the Indigenous Women's Economic Development program. The title represents our special focus on indigenous women whose empowerment we recognize as essential to the eradication of poverty.

In 1990 Plenty opened "De Colores," a retail version of OWTC and joined up with the growing international fair trade movement helping to establish the "Fair Trade Federation" (FTF) - an international organization made up of marketing and producer organizations in the "North" and "South" dedicated to strengthening fair trade enterprise and energizing economically-depressed economies.

Today, IWED's Program Director, Catherine Renno, is the Chairwoman of FTF and one of the leaders of the Fair Trade movement. Over the past ten years Plenty has worked with hundreds of indigenous craft and textile producer organizations and thousands of individual artisans. Impressed by their enthusiastic commitment, we are disturbed the failure of their efforts to effect real change in their daily lives.

Our strategy reflects a two-pronged approach: help the producers through technical and funding assistance and help to educate consumers and business people alike about fair trade issues.

Native People live in the last frontiers of the endangered natural world, the Amazon Basin of Brazil, the Montane Forest of New Guinea, the Andes of Peru, the Central Highlands of Guatemala, the rainforests of Guyana, the great plains, woodlands and everglades of North America, the steppes of Tibet, the savannas of Africa, the ice caps of the Arctic Circle. For untold centuries these resourceful peoples have been the stewards and caretakers of those and other eco-regions. Before the Conquest, they had evolved efficient, sustainable methods of existing in harmony with their local environments. This is not to say that indigenous people have always lived like uncorrupted Adams and Eves in their idyllic gardens of Eden, but obviously the demands they placed on their natural surroundings were small and the costs replenishable compared to the catastrophic damages committed by the insatiable appetites of the Industrial Revolution.

Environmentalists and other lovers of the earth's natural wonders are making bold moves to preserve them. The Native People are telling us that there is a strategy for preservation that needs to be considered. If Native People can achieve sustainable economic self-sufficiency on the lands where they live, they will not have to migrate to the cities and abandon the places of which they are the most capable protectors. If they are able to continue to exist sustainably and harmoniously on the lands where they are now living, those lands will not be available to be exploited and destroyed.

As mentioned above, since 1976, the interests and needs and predicament of Native People have been a priority for PLENTY. In every case, our work with Native People has originated from a request by them. Our role has been to provide technical, financial and volunteer assistance as well as helping to amplify the voices of these people in the world and educating other people in the United States about them. The projects have focused on primary health care, agriculture, alternative energy, communications systems, art and crafts marketing and other forms of micro-economic development.

In 1995, PLENTY holds a number of direct, thoughtful requests for financial and technical assistance from native groups we have been working with for some time. These groups include the Arawaks of Guyana, the Caribs of Dominica and St. Vincent, the Garifuna of Belize, the Maya of Belize and Guatemala, the Oglala Lakotas of South Dakota, the Wailakis and Yukis of Northern California.

The Plenty Bulletin is mailed quarterly to all donors. Comments: plentyplenty1@usit.net

• Plenty USA
• PO Box 394
• Summertown TN 38483-0394 USA
• 615-964-4864

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