Cecilia Foxworthy: “To create inclusive prosperity we must include women, plants and animals”

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Cecilia Foxworthy wants the organization she has led—Agora Partnerships—for three years (2020) to help balance power in Latin America. She is sure that to do so, she and her collaborators in the region have to put all their efforts into gender equality and sustainable care of the environment, and make these two axes the bases within growing companies. led by women. “Power: for me everything revolves around that word. My goal is to try to balance the position of power between the little ones and the big ones — and they can be defined however they want — but in any project that we execute, there is something of that element, of balancing power. That's why we launched Together We Count“, Explain.

This program seeks to promote the businesses of 6,000 women in Mexico, El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala, through support that is based on four points: training, linkage with the market, access to financing and access to technology. “Our mission is the creation of inclusive prosperity; That has to include women and that also includes plants and animals. We have to protect the environment and I believe that women have the greatest potential to do so because at the end of the day we all come from the earth, there is a reason it is called Pachamama.”

Foxworthy studied Fashion Design in New York, the city in which she was born and in which she has grown up: “her city”, as she repeatedly refers to it. She is the starting point and the basis for her in the extensive list of places in which she has worked in recent decades. When she began her training, it was clear that, to begin with, she would stay in that field for no more than five years, and she complied with it. She started with an organization in which she marketed the crafts of women from some 35 countries around the world, a route that included works made by female hands from Africa, Latin America or the Middle East. “There I had the opportunity to work with very impressive women, who were leading hidden schools for girls in Afghanistan, or imprisoned women in various Middle Eastern countries; I worked with quite a few notable women. They were the ones who were really making the changes, and many of them were constantly putting themselves at risk,” she recalls.

That experience, she says, gave her the opportunity to have two essential points of view for the vision she has right now in Latin America: she learned from the work of all the artisans, but also how to bring her products to the US market. He then managed to do an MBA—Master in Business Administration; Master in Business Administration—and due to the “overwhelming” nature of the tasks she had to do in so many countries around the globe, she decided that she would focus only on a region that she had always felt close to: Latin America.

Foxworthy, a New Yorker by birth, is also Peruvian by origin. Her mother is of that nationality, and in that gigantic and iconic city in the United States, she grew up with a mother and grandmother who always spoke to her in Spanish. “I still feel at home when I come to Latin America,” she says. Before her landing at Agora, Foxworthy had already worked on other NGO. In one of them, he moved to Bolivia for two years to work directly with about 200 Aymara artisans: “In that case they also spoke Spanish as a second language and so did I, so it was perfect. “That allowed me to really understand the realities of people like them with very limited resources.”

Agora Partnerships was founded in Nicaragua in 2005. After several stages in the organization's life, in 2020, Foxworthy became its CEO. This project began as an impact investment fund, but evolved to what it is today: a non-profit organization that works directly with entrepreneurs in Latin America in which it seeks to inherently sow the importance of values ​​that help not not only small and medium-sized companies in the short term, but also that these companies gradually become factors of positive changes in the long term—creators of gender equality and successful managers of environmental care—within their own communities.

At Agora, 50.25% of business projects are led by women; They have the collaboration of 2,527 companies, and with almost 4,000 entrepreneurs on their lists. They have operational presence in Colombia, Mexico, Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Argentina, Panama and Costa Rica. And soon in Ecuador, Peru, Dominican Republic, Chile and Uruguay. When Foxworthy is asked about the complexity of regions like this, she confirms: “All or almost all Latin American countries are or have been or are going to experience complexities. It is a virtuous and vicious circle, so we already know what is going to happen, when exactly the issue is, but I think it is a mistake to leave a country just when things get complicated, especially if you have an interest in serving women. and to create gender equality.”

Obituary | Ana Lorena Cartín and the rebel project of RNC Radio

On March 21, Ana Lorena Cartín Leiva, a brave and consistent woman, supportive and dedicated to her ideals, died in Costa Rica. She was the director and legal representative of a project that, from a distance, seems more like a utopia: Radio Noticias del Continente, RNC, a shortwave radio station that some exiles from the Montoneros group, from Argentina, established from exile in San José, Costa Rica.

Cartín Leiva was a chemist by training, from a young age she was interested in participating in politics, but also in generating changes “from below.” She assured, in an interview for this newspaper, that only in this way would things have a real transformation that would cause people to have a genuine desire to participate in them. She had already done radio years before together with a friend, they had a program that sought to achieve “that culture was democratized and that it was not only for the elites.” Her election as general director of RNC, in 1979, when she was 31 years old, took her by surprise: “I always believed that I was going to be part of the team, that I was going to work, but I did not expect that my colleagues would have visualized me. with that capacity for militant solidarity and they gave me such responsibility.”

RNC had a brief existence – it only broadcast for three years – during which time it was the target of four bomb attacks. The station became a space where the Sandinista National Liberation Front of El Salvador, the Nicaraguan Resistance, Guatemalans fleeing violence, or Panamanians fighting for control of the Panama Canal, came to broadcast messages, reports of war, or complaints of violations of their rights and those of the populations to which they belonged.

In a statement issued this week by the CLACSO Violence in Central America Working Group, they highlight the following: “At 31 years old, Ana Lorena faced the interference of the Argentine dictatorship in Costa Rica, which requested information from her to achieve the radio closure. Three years after its opening and in the face of the attempt to end broadcasts and four attacks with weapons and bombs, the solidarity network with the radio came from countries such as Mexico, Nicaragua, the Dominican Republic, Panama, Ecuador and also from the Latin American Federation of “Journalists protested be
fore the president of Costa Rica.”

In 1981, Ana Lorena commented:

“At this crossroads for press freedom in Costa Rica and in our punished Latin American continent, I reiterate my point about the arbitrariness that would entail closing a media outlet, under whatever pretext, and leaving the terrorists who carried out armed attacks unpunished. against RNC, to the infiltrators in the state security forces who attacked the safety of the company and its workers, to the accomplices of the dictatorships who, with luxury of resources, dedicated themselves to insulting the station and, what is much worse, to deceive the people of Costa Rica with a concerted series of misrepresentations.”

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