Gladys: What kind of support
do you impart to them for this
project?
Lara: At the moment we’re im-
parting more of values than
technical skills. Technically
what Batak craft does now is
essentially we connect them to
the market. As of this point we
are not imposing anything to
them. We do not give them any
designs but through the help of
our crowdsourcing campaign
we hopefully can help them
develop new products. A lot of
it has been just teaching them
Photo by: Sanda Jao and Faith Veloro
Grandma weaver
values and helping them get gap under their state of mind
more organized.
right now. We’re trying to build
the foundations first which
It takes time to build trust with is to cultivate the values and
them. For us it took years to go once we have that framework
back and forth to their plac- in place then it’s easy to teach
es, living with them. And so them some other stuff already
I think the values that we im- because they will now be men-
parted were critical thinking. tally, emotionally, and cultural-
As tribes, they were a bit gull- ly prepared for it.
ible. What we wanted to im-
part to them was to make them Gladys: From the research you
think outside of their boundar- conducted to now, what has
ies, to always question things. been the progress so far?
And from there they can start
thinking about entrepreneur- Lara: The formal research stat-
ship because it’s still a very long ed around October 2014 with
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