CENTRAL AMERICA PILOT PROJECT:
Breaking the Silence in El Salvador
The cycle of gender-based violence
Breaking the cycle of gender-based violence
In 2022, funded by the U.S. Department of State, we embarked on a pilot project to reduce gender-based violence in El Salvador. In partnership with local NGO Glasswing, World Mother trained Salvadoran community workers to empower and uplift 9- to 18-year-old girls across the country.
WE TAUGHT THEM HOW TO:
• Create safe spaces for self-reflection and self-expression
• Listen openly without judgment
•Tell their own stories
•Listen to and retell their mother’s stories
• Apply and adapt the method throughout El Salvador
Sofia’s Story
After listening to her mother’s story, community worker Sofia Mangandi shared the story with her peers:
“Through my love, I understood my mother better. I understood that the time had come to accept things, to see what had happened to me and lovingly embrace it, to lovingly embrace myself. Before then, the emotion I had felt most throughoutmy life was loneliness, feeling utterly alone. Now, I don’t feel alone any more.”
As of September 2023:
49 community workers have been taught how to use the method
15 organizations have expressed interest in incorporating the method into their programming
191 girls have participated in storytelling workshops
“I am what I could have been,” someone once said. So, in telling their story—in discovering it— people can become something they weren’t before but that they were always meant to be.”
MATT BOLAND
Public Affairs Officer, U.S. Embassy San Salvador
Impact
“At a moment of profound cultural and political divisions, the World Mother Storytelling Project has devised as tangible a creative intervention as they come. I can say, without reservation, that this is an effort that the world needs now. Very few stories in life are at once universal and wildly divergent—a mother’s story is one of them. It is one of the few life arenas that is shared by everyone, and yet also strangely obscured from our close attention. Mothers, at last, merit this.”
SARAH STILLMAN, Staff Writer, The New Yorker
“At a time of great peril to humanity, we are engulfed in uncertainty and fear. We are compelled to socially distance when our natural inclination is to reach out and connect. The World Mother Storytelling Project comes at such a fitting moment. Here is the opportunity to connect in a most fundamental way, between mother and child, a universal connection. Now more than ever, sharing mothers’ stories and wisdom can nourish and bring comfort to our anxious souls.”
WAFAA EL SADR, Director, Columbia World Projects, ICAP
