About Us

Founders

AlterNatives was founded in 1992 by Guadalupe Ramirez and Ben Blevins to market weaving crafted by widows of political violence during Guatemala’s 36 long civil war.

 

Guadalupe Ramirez

Guadalupe Ramirez was born in the town of Tejutla San Marcos in the Western Highlands of Guatemala. The descendant of slaves, the lives of her family were transformed when nuns from Belgium arrived after Vatican II to foster liberation through education and empowerment. Guadalupe’s father was selected to participate in a program to train cooperative leaders and became a leader in the cooperative movement. The change fostered by the organization of cooperatives was substantial and long lasting. For example, in one generation her family went from illiterate peasants to having one sister who is an accountant, one sister is a schoolteacher, one sister who has her MBA and the youngest is working on a postgraduate degree in Chemical engineering.

 

Spending much of her childhood in cooperatives meetings, Guadalupe learned that people could change their lives for the better by working together. While there are serious challenges confronting indigenous communities, it is the practices of consensus and community action that have allowed her people to survive centuries of injustice and marginalization.

 

Ben Blevins

Ben Blevins was “radicalized” after a mission trip during his freshman year of college to Central America. As one minister said, “he was someone who took the experience more seriously than the church intended”. Ben had enrolled in college as a Theater major but switched to economic development in the Third World (not his choice of language).

 

He was most interested in investigating the causes of poverty and the most sustainable strategies for transforming the conditions of poverty. After Graduating from the University of Richmond, he went to Guatemala to work for human rights. During his time in Guatemala in the early 1990’s, he became aware of the cooperatives movement and experienced the positive long-term benefits the movements accomplished. He was “sold” on the potential for small business development as a more appropriate response to the causes of poverty than the dependency laden models of charity and child sponsorship programs.