I spent the second week of my Leadership in Action project working with Forest Post, a social enterprise that aims to provide employment opportunities for tribal women by celebrating their knowledge of the forest and traditional craft. We worked alongside the Muthuvar and Malayar women, two forest-dependent indigenous communities in Kerala.
On Monday, we travelled to the beautiful Athirappilly waterfalls to meet a group of four weavers from the Muthuvar community. They shared with us the time-consuming process of weaving handmade baskets, mats and bookmarks from locally harvested bamboo. They taught us how to weave simple patterns in the bamboo, and thanks to their help and patience, and in spite of the language barrier, we produced our own bamboo weaving.
The first day at Forest Post made clear the enterprise’s key principle of collaboration: though we had many differences with the indigenous women, by working together we were able to learn from them and also use our own experience to support Forest Post’s social media marketing strategy (our first mini-consulting project). Working alongside four other scholars helped me to stay engaged with the work, and though the direction of our work was sometimes unclear, it was always easy to discuss with the other scholars what our next step should be.
The rest of the week was spent at Forest Post’s manufacturing unit with the Malayar women, where they produce beeswax soaps and lip balms. Again, this is a representation of the strong focus on collaboration at Forest Post: the Malayar women provide sustainably harvested beeswax as stewards of the forest, and Forest Post trains the women on how to produce soaps and other products with it. The benefit of this is twofold: natural resources are only extracted from the forest at renewable levels; and the indigenous women are paid fairly for their work to ensure they do not need to move away from the forest and abandon their culture and community.
On our final day at Forest Post, we had the opportunity to learn eco-printing from Pooja, who teaches the technique to indigenous women as another product they can sell. The technique involved pressing leaves to fabric in order to block out natural dyes. Furthermore, eco-printing uses far less water than other types of printing, since the system uses re-usable steam to set the dye, rather than dirtying clean water with dye to set the colour.
I am so grateful to have spent the last week at Forest Post, learning from and working with the brilliant women there. I have learnt that, though there are many things you cannot control, by working with others and keeping an optimistic and adaptable mindset, a situation can always be improved. Many thanks to Manju, the founder of Forest Post, and the indigenous women for letting us visit and being so welcoming and willing to speak to us.
You can find out more about Forest Post here: https://forestpost.in/