NEW Pathways to Enterprise™ is an organization dedicated to empowering women and their families through innovative livelihood alternatives. NEW Pathways' mission is to enable economically disadvantaged women for livelihoods that offer profitable returns, and opportunities for creativity and increased self-esteem resulting from their enterprise efforts. We serve as an incubator for innovative livelihood education and development projects, drawing on recent advances in the social sciences in the fields of social networks, knowledge management, and adult education for women. Our direct beneficiaries are poor women living on less than $2.00 per day, with the majority classified as the extreme poor, living on less than $1.25.NEW Pathways goals are:
- To overcome lack of information required to make optimal decisions about livelihood
- To enhance decision-making skills to envision, analyze and evaluate alternatives
- To offer a network of livelihood experts, successful entrepreneurs, and business innovators that mentors and supports participants through the process
- To facilitate opportunities for participants to apply their enhanced capabilities to enterprise development.
New Pathways guides women through the entrepreneurial process from idea generation to demonstration projects and start-ups. NEW Pathways designs and delivers a series of interactive IdeaShops™ that inspire participants to explore, expand, and evaluate alternatives for profitable, sustainable businesses. Our program opens with an 'idea generation' module, the essential first step in the entrepreneurial process. This approach significantly improves livelihood training results because it enables women to initiate higher value-added business options, offering opportunities for creativity and enhanced self esteem, along with a greater likelihood of increased profitability over their lifetimes. The vast majority of women's development programs today ignore this step. As a result, women around the world too often spend their lives laboring in fields that offer low financial returns, lack of security, and low self-esteem. NEW Pathways is designed to overcome this weakness.
NEW Pathways seeks out and then introduces participants to a GLocal network of successful entrepreneurs, business innovators, and livelihood experts, who share their success stories and describe emerging business opportunities. These discussions stimulate creative thought among the participants about the relative attractiveness of these options, many times leading to the emergence of 'hybrid' ideas that draw on local knowledge and skills, but applying them in new ways, including the adaptation of business ideas to the local context. The GLocal network continues to support participants as they move from the idea generation phase to business development, serving as instructors, mentors, and facilitators for the requisite business skills training.
Each participant receives personal attention through one-on-one interviews, mentorships, and the individual assessment process. Interviews are held following each IdeaShop™ and the results are summarized and shared with all participants to enrich the overall knowledge base enabling participants to make better individual and group decisions regarding the most attractive alternatives for profitable, sustainable enterprise.
We work with successful microfinance institutions, local grass roots organizations, universities, and public agencies to insure that women receive the technical and business skills training they need to be successful. NEW Pathways' interventions leverage microcredit lending, business skills training, and other initiatives on behalf of women's economic empowerment. Working together we can have the most positive, direct, and immediate impact on the lives of disadvantaged women and their families.
Current NEW Pathways' Activities in the Philippines
Who We Serve
NEW Pathways is working in the Visayas, on Negros Island in the municipality of Valladolid. The case example provided here is in the agricultural community of Doldol, a poor agricultural community with a population of approximately 800, mostly engaged in rice growing. There is no mechanized production equipment; all the work is done by hand. Children walk or are driven in groups in the back of pedicabs to their school in the next village, miles away. The local dialect is Hiligayan, but several community leaders with whom we work are reasonably fluent in English and a half dozen local women serve as translators.
With the help of NEW Pathways and its partners, the Doldol Garment Center was founded in 2010 because the women themselves had this idea, a dream to have their own business. Now their Garment Center is established and has grown to an operation with 17 machines. A dozen women have graduated from a Department of Trade and Industry-sponsored sewing class; over 30 women have taken the smocking baby dresses course, and a dozen additional women and men have been trained on higher power, industrial machines.
What We Do: To Date
In 2012 the first IdeaShops™ were held for women from Doldol and the outpost of Malingin, an impoverished village 30 miles away. Presentations on day one covered livelihood alternatives recommended by the local women, included food processing of salted eggs, duck embryo production, and basket/bag-making using dried rice stalks, foil, and paper. Those on day two featured high value-added, market-oriented, and creative opportunities, including rug- and rag-making for commercial sales to industrial consumers, jewelry-making, lithograph and card-making, and crafting one-of-a-kind baby bibs.Three GLocal network livelihood experts from the Philippine Department and Trade and Industry and the Municipal Environment and Natural Resources Office in Valladolid presented indigenous livelihood alternatives, based on local knowledge. NEW Pathways brought in Nelly Nacino, an entrepreneur from Manila who built a business from one sewing machine on credit in 1989 to create the 200-woman strong Mother and Child Association, and Kristine Kowalski, an artist at Keridwen Studios, Annapolis, Maryland, U.S. These external resources inspired women to expand their field of view, and to explore new ideas.
Following these presentations and interactive discussions, our interview team of six individuals met with each participant individually to listen and learn as they discussed their livelihood goals and their most important considerations when making livelihood decisions. After discussing these decision criteria, each woman was asked to select the livelihood opportunities that she found most appealing, including those discussed at the IdeaShop™ as well as others she had considered. The results of all the interviews, documented, summarized, and archived, were shared with the participants and formed the basis for technical and skills training featured in the second phase.
There was an energetic and enthusiastic response from the women to innovative, higher-value added, and creative livelihood alternatives. Women were joyous, inspired, and motivated, to envision the expanded world of opportunities they had not previously known about or considered. As Lynde Untal, one participant and community leader remarked, "We can have this livelihood for the whole barangay, for the purpose of helping one another…I believe it will be you spreading this throughout the world, not only in Doldol…without you this wouldn't be possible." The livelihood alternative favored by a substantial majority of the participants was rag-making, rug-making, and shoe covers.
 |
| Lynde Untal, 2012 IdeaShop™ participant |
Achievements in 2012
NEW Pathways launched two innovative livelihood projects in 2012 based on participants' top priorities.- "Rag- and Rug-Making and More!" is preparing over thirty new entrepreneurs for commercial production and sales of textile products in high local demand. For completing their technical training, each participant was awarded two looms each (large and small sizes), and an initial bundle of materials to start their businesses. In addition to business skills training, participants are participating in a 6 month demonstration phase through January 2013, with incentives for income generation, market development, and sustainability. Early results indicate that women are earning a 50% return on their initial capital!
- Creative Arts for Rural Development (CARD) Project was initiated based on the aspirations among many of our participants is to develop livelihood alternatives around opportunities for artistic expression. Over 20% of our interviewees told us that one of their top priorities is to paint artwork for notecards. In response NEW Pathways is designing sets of notecards around the works of aspiring artists in rural, remote areas. These cards are unique because they come to you from women and their families who have never before had the opportunity to express themselves through art or to share their works with you.
Plans and Aspirations for 2013
Based on our results to date, and the number of requests we have received to expand our activities, we are proposing the following program plan for next year:- Open a NEW Pathways satellite campus in Vallalodid to meet the requests for IdeaShops™ that are now emerging from over 20 barangays within this municipality, working in concert with the municipal government and the Philippine Department of Trade and Industry. (Each barangay’s population is in the range of 1,000 or more.)
- Offer the full series of three IdeaShops™ in eastern Negros Island for women from the communities of Kalomboyan, Caican, Nagbinlod, and Banaybanay, working with U.S. and Philippines partners.
- Expand throughout the Visayas, a chain of six principal islands with an estimated population of 11 million. starting on Samar in 2013, where we will be working in collaboration with the Negros Women of Tomorrow Foundation (NWTF), a microfinance institution, and SBN’s ‘Mom’s Radio,’ dedicated to empowering women, and the most listened-to station among women throughout the Visayas. A strategic planning session in Calbayan would be followed by IdeaShops™ 1-3. (We have been asked by Dr. del Castillo, Executive Director of NWTF, and Dr. Linnie Dinolpol, Vice President of SBN, to collaborate with them throughout the Visayas. )
- Work with local leaders to access Philippine government permission to offer certificate programs and Negosyante "Entrepreneur" diplomas for women without formal education who complete our full program.
- Provide start-up financing for demonstration projects on Negros Island and Samar.
The municipality of Vallalodid awarded a Certificate of Recognition to Professor Christine
Nielsen, President of NEW Pathways, "for her exemplary contribution
conceptualizing Pathways for Women toward Global Entrepreneurship and Women's
Empowerment." (January 23, 2012)