Our Ecological Center     

Building our centre


Four years ago, we began dreaming of what Sol y Verde could become if we owned our own land and built a community center on it, which could become a space of education and experimentation offering free training and teaching to our local community, and the particular vulnerable groups we work in. Today, after devoting much effort and energy to bring to life this vision, we are excited to say that we have raised $27,000 to begin our centre’s construction. We completed our classroom building in Spring 2024. We are now seeking long-term partners to help match fund this and enable us to complete the rest of the centre by late 2025.
    

       
         
→ Read our classroom building impact report
→ Donate to our crowdfunding campaign
                                                          
Our Ecological Centre is partially funded by   
     
                      

         
        
        
          



Our Vision


Our founder and director Baltazar started Sol y Verde with a dream: to build Petén’s first permaculture Education Centre, to teach conservation and Mayan culture specifically to young children and women from all around Petén. He imagined it as a place of knowledge sharing, where rural communities could work together across the fields of natural medicine, bioconstruction and nature restoration.

This dream was ambitious, particularly when we first received our land in Paxcaman, a heavily pastured and deforested 6.2 acres without any access to water or electricity, and little to no funds available to us. Most local community members live in half finished houses made from unsustainable materials that have no climate resilience, and no capacity for water capture or solar energy storage. So we wanted to demonstrate that our soils and natural materials can be used for affordable and resilient building, much like ancestral Mayan bioconstruction. We began by looking at our land, experimenting with hay, clay, corn husks to lime from the mountains: every agricultural material could be a building material. From this was born our vision for Sol y Verde’s educational centre.
                
      


What is the centre?


Our centre will act as a safe community-led place of learning, a space for creativity and innovation, and a demonstration of bioconstruction techniques (showing innovative uses of local, natural materials). 

Split between two connected buildings, our centre will be made of 5 spaces:

1. An ecological classroom (where education programmes will be run every week for women and youth) completed in Spring 2024

2. An ecological library (which will cover themes from rural independence, Maya and Indigenous knowledge, feminist works in Central America, migration and permaculture) 

3. A seed bank (from our own species, and endangered specimens)

4. A kitchen laboratory (where women’s groups can process plants and develop our Green Pharmacy products)

5. A natural materials workshop (for bamboo and Greenwood work)
Our spaces are community-run and are designed to be modular to all sorts of uses, events and partnerships completed by Autumn 2024
            


Some facts about our Classroom



500+ students taught in our ecological education programme, by 2025.
In the summer season, our building has been 12°C cooler than outdoors - all through passive ventilation, climate-driven design, and natural materials.
With participatory building and our workshops, we upskilled over 47 local women and children.
               

Read our Classroom Report



We’ve run over 18 workshops and training sessions throughout the construction.
 6 materials were used - nothing more. 86% of our materials were sourced within 30km of our site.
We worked with 28 local craftsmen and artisans from our neighbouring villages.


Why this matters


Prioritising women and children
In Guatemala, access to fulfilling education is a privilege. 27% of youth are not engaged in schooling, employment, or training, and 67% of 10-year-olds struggle with basic reading comprehension. The government allocates less than 3% of its resources to education and a mere 0.3% to social support (World Bank, 2020). Early marriage and child-rearing lead to dropout for women (half of them below the age of 20)  (UNESCO, 2020). The national curriculum neglects arts and creativity, leaving many with insufficient practical skills. High levels of systemic poverty force children to leave school for income generation. Children engaged in family farming often only learn to repeat unsustainable practices, like maize monocultures, which lack resilience to climate change. This leaves our local rural communities vulnerable and with uncertain futures.

Creating demonstration and sharing knowledge
We want this new centre to become an experimental way of rediscovering hyper-local and indigenous ways of building and reintroducing curiosity and hands-on learning. We want to provide free education for children and women of all ages, focusing on practical, demonstrative skills around agroecology and bioconstruction. A lot of our local community have experienced displacement, or have direct family members who have been forced to migrate to provide for their families. Our goal is to share the tools needed for women and children to maximise the use of their land by regenerating and cultivating them, improving their skills, and creating a large support network. 

Our guiding principles


We have 5 core intentions for this project. They have been developed in a participatory manner through inclusive workshops with women and children. Together we have co-imagined and co-designed this one-of-a-kind community space.

1. Using natural, local materials and replicable construction methods to ensure replicability and accessibility.

2. Bringing our community into the process, every step of the way: from inception to construction.

3. Connect local craftsmen together and encouraged collaborative construction.

4. Using our centre’s construction as a tool to create training and bioconstruction opportunities.

5. Creating an inspirational, dignified and safe space that our local women and children feel ownership over.

Feeling inspired?
As we are in the process of fundraising and designing the rest of our centre, and we are constantly looking for support. 

→ Volunteer to help us build the centre
→ Donate to our crowdfunding campaign

      





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