Creategood.org | Create Good helps the poor who live in coffee growing regions in Latin America. Through water and economic infrastructure projects, Create Good brings clean water and jobs to the developing world. Uniquely focused on creating sustainable products and sustainable communities, we partnered with Ecofiltro to provide safe filtered water after we have transformed a community by providing running water through a gravity-fed water system, well, or spring capture. Our work in the field starts with you. Donate atwww.creategood.org. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google+.

Coffee Flowers - Photo by S. Snyder

Field after field of coffee plants bloom in fragrant tidy bundles like miniature lilies. Guatemalans are excited about the coffee this year. Just the right amount of rain and plenty of sun encouraged the plants to give a full spring show, indicating what is to come: coffee and lots of it. Like an end-of-an-era gift from the Maya who are in their final year of the Bak’tun, a 400-year period in the long-count Mayan calendar which has counted days for the ancient civilization since 3,114 B.C. For now, farmers wait to give thanks until harvest, hoping they can protect the plants from disease, insects, and hurricanes.

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Create Good Foundation, with support from founding partner Pura Vida Create Good, helps the poor who live in coffee growing regions in Latin America. Through water and economic infrastructure projects, Create Good brings clean water and jobs to the developing world. Uniquely focused on creating sustainable products and sustainable communities, Create Good partnered with Ecofiltro to provide safe drinking water to communities already transformed by access to running water. Create Good’s director recently moved to Guatemala where he collaborates in person with the director of Ecofiltro, local business/NGO partners, and villagers in Guatemala, Nicaragua, and Mexico. All of this work in the field starts with you. Donate at creategood.org. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google+.

Sun is Cheap

Laundry - Photo by S. Snyder

Drying clothes on the line reminds me of a bygone era when people used natural resources to work for them. At my grandparents’ house in Indiana, I remember watching my grandmother put up and take down clothes from long lines in the yard. After blowing in the breeze for a few hours, sheets and brushed cotton behave better than t-shirts and knits who become unruly bagged-out versions of themselves. At the end of the day, though color fades quickly in the Guatemalan sun, it’s a small contribution to Mother Nature, nostalgia . . . and our insane electric costs. It only took one bill for me to remember grandma’s old-timey backyard where wind is free.

Unwary

Boy of El Cedin - Photo by S. Snyder

Peeking in at his parents who sit folded into primary desks, this boy listens to our presentation on filtering water in the home. Over three days, Create Good talked to El Cedin School Community about the health benefits of using Ecofiltro: the way it will alleviate common bacterial contamination and subsequent intestinal illness. His face doesn’t betray the choice weighed by his parents and all the others in the room; it’s as carefree as we are in the States when we hand our children clean water from the tap.

Family Abroad

Family Abroad - Photo by S. Snyder

The Spoor family, longtime friends of my own childhood family, recently took their kids on the kind of trip that does more than remind yourselves that you’re on a break from routine. Sarah and Lincoln wanted to learn about the Ecofiltro factory in Antigua and take their children to the field to see what Create Good does. I took them to a village outside of San Martin Jilotepeque where we walked from house to house, seeing the access to clean drinking water and having conversations with families whose lives look just a little different than what the kids back home are used to.

Beginning in Patzocon

Baby of Patzocon - Photo by S. Snyder

Trying out her expression of hunger so well, this newborn in Patzocon reminded me that we all begin with the same language: vulnerability. The mother’s face emits calmness, knowing she has bathed, bundled, and fed her baby with the same love and attention that we give all babies fresh to the world, reminding me of the days when my own three daughters adjusted their eyes to my face and tried to focus.

Patience

Weaving in Patzocon - photo by S. Snyder

Long sheets of sage green stretch out on the loom like a still cold sea. Carefully, this fifteen-year-old girl plucks two-inch lengths of fuschia through every other green thread, bringing heat and life to the water. Artistry like this is a slow process, consuming two months to complete one blouse. Slow, but valuable, is the skill of weaving in the village of Patzocon. Used or sold, she has made something that represents, through color and pattern, the village and her people. Her mother watches on as her daughter pulls the next horizontal line of thread tight, tamping down dozens of pink threads now secured into the emerging design.

Antigua, Guatemala

El Carmen - photo S. Snyder

Antigua, Guatemala, is filled with ruins such as this one. El Carmen is one of many crumbling 17^th-century cathedrals dotted along cobblestone roads that once ushered in an era of change for Guatemalans. Spain brought conquest and Catholicism here, creating an interesting juxtaposition between the Maya and their newfound Fathers. Not much has changed for the Guatemalans. They continue to straddle a world between ancient beliefs of agriculture, community, and survival and that of the New World who brings wealth, industry, and a different brand of survival. As I travel between Antigua and the communities where we work, I return at the end of the day continually struck by the hardship and poverty just outside of this small city who sits at the base of ancient volcanoes, the only witnesses to the Guatemalans ever-reaching struggle to adapt.

Ecofiltro Inauguration Day in Video & Photo

: A blessing by Father Juan

: A toast by the inventor and the CEO

: Ribbon Cutting – Philip, Jeff, and Ray

: Kiln Opening

: Jeff Hussey observing the kiln after it opened.

: Center – Mr. and Mrs. Ray Ruddy

: Left to Right – Jeff, Christine, Matt, Diago, Chris

Create Good helps the poor who live in coffee growing regions in Latin America. Through water and economic infrastructure projects, Create Good brings clean water and jobs to the developing world. Uniquely focused on creating sustainable products and sustainable communities, Create Good partnered with Ecofiltro to provide safe drinking water to communities already transformed by access to running water. Create Good’s director recently moved to Guatemala where he collaborates in person with the director of Ecofiltro, local business/NGO partners, and villagers in Guatemala, Nicaragua, and Mexico. All of this work in the field starts with you. Donate at creategood.org. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google+.

WATER FILTERS FOR A NEW WORLD

Grassroots Factory Expands Capacity Tenfold to Meet Demand

Antigua, Guatemala, 29 March 2012 — Thirty years in the making, Ecofiltro opens a new factory today, allowing the company to produce ten times more filters than before. In high demand, these filters are a simple solution to potable water for the developing world. Able to uniquely target urban, suburban, and rural water issues, this brand of water filtration will be the dawn of a new era for safe water for the masses.

International Development Agencies took interest in Ecofiltro when the company won Nokia’s Best Idea prize in 2011, beating out thousands of other entries worldwide. Made of carbon and clay, the filters designed by Guatemalan biochemist, Lic. Fernando Mazariegos, endorse sustainable, earth friendly, low-cost materials.

But it’s not just the product itself that is sustainable. CEO of Ecofiltro, Philip Wilson, introduced a new method of ensuring that clean water does not disappear when charitable donations run out. Avoiding the usual one to two year shelf life of development projects, Ecofiltro has put extensive resources and labor into building an infrastructure for maintaining filter systems long-term.

In 2011, Ecofiltro partnered with Create Good, a nonprofit who funds field programs that train and employ locals to carry out the logistics of filter usage — from testing filters, to maintenance and replacement, and financing of filters — essential to building a reliable business network that serves hundreds and potentially millions of people nationwide.

Ecofiltro compliments Create Good’s philosophy that clean water is not free anywhere in the world, but that it’s worth paying for. The only way to make it accessible to the third world is to build an infrastructure, both economical and logistical, that provides clean water and jobs for a lifetime, not just the lifetime of one charitable donation.

Create Good helps the poor who live in coffee growing regions in Latin America. Through water and economic infrastructure projects, Create Good brings clean water and jobs to the developing world. Uniquely focused on creating sustainable products and sustainable communities, we partnered with Ecofiltro to provide safe filtered water after we have transformed a community by providing running water through a gravity-fed water system, well, or spring capture. Create Good’s director recently moved to Guatemala where he meets in person with the director of Ecofiltro, the local business/NGO partners, and the people in village communities in Guatemala, Nicaragua, and Mexico. All of this work in the field starts with you. Donate at www.creategood.org.

Firsthand

New Ecofiltro Factory

Two months ago, I moved to Antigua, Guatemala. I had never seen a coffee farm before my first trip down here six years ago when I traveled on a sustainable development tour with Pura Vida Partners (now called Create Good Foundation). Today, as the Director for Create Good, living in Guatemala, serving the people in this country, I am grateful for this opportunity that began as a 10-day ecotourism adventure several years ago. From Associate Fundraiser to Director, my work with Create Good has grown along with my interest in Central America and the needs of its poor.

My role as director looks something like this. I work with Ecofiltro to create a distribution system that will bring filters to all of Guatemala—urban, suburban, and rural. Our goal is to create a system that functions within the Guatemalan infrastructure without the continued support of charity. Since I arrived in January, we have launched into research that explores partnerships with tiendas (small independent stores) and banks in order to provide Guatemalans the ability to save and purchase filters. Pilot programs will be launched in the coming months.

Inauguration of new water system in El Durazno

An important part of my job is to identify rural communities who desire to improve their health by creating better water sources, sanitation, clean burning stoves, and water filtration. This keeps me in the field often, providing valuable data and personal contact with the recipients of our work.

My relationship to you, the donors and customers, involves documenting our work and telling our story. Using videography, photography, and writing for our social media, I maintain our Web site and its purpose of keeping you involved in Central America, including our projects in Nicaragua and Mexico. I wouldn’t be here without you, and more importantly, neither would the thousands of dollars you’ve put towards real solutions for Central America’s daily hardships.

As I look at my own Ecofiltro sitting in my kitchen, it reminds me of how important it is to have the director of a charity in the target country. Over the past two months, I’ve only just begun to see nuances of a culture that seems so remote from a desk in Seattle. One of my favorite moments recently was the celebration for running water in El Durazno. Fighting for composure, the leader of this small village explained how long they had suffered without the simple resource of water and how grateful they are that Create Good relieved that burden. I wish you could have been there to see what your money does, how far it goes.

Thank you,

More Photos

My family at the inauguration of the water system in El Durazno

Inside the new Ecofiltro factory

One of the new kilns at the Ecofiltro factory

View from of the new Ecofiltro offices with volcano "Agua" in the background.

Jose, (left) President of El Durazno and Julio, (right) one of our amazing field staff at the inauguration of the water system in El Durazno

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Coffee Honors the End of an Era