The Past Two Months in Review

Hello Everyone,

I was inspired to review the past two months through photos. Enjoy!

A view of city from the 12th floor of the University of Guadalajara.

We see so many incredible sunsets from our rooftop.

Read more »

Same Places, New Perspectives

Saturday we went on a moving and rich tour of the Ahogado watershed and a portion of the Santiago watershed with two classes of students from Iteso, a Jesuit college located on the outskirts of Guadalajara.  While we are still wrapping up our workshops in Juanacatán and El Salto, we began workshops with approximately 50 students at Iteso in collaboration with the professor and our friend, Étienne.  There are some great photos of the journey, click here to peruse them all.
Read more »

World Premiere of KLC Reporting

We are incredibly excited to share the first of many videos created in the popular education workshops we are running in Juanacatlán and Guadalajara.  Karen, Lety, and Cristian live in and around Juanacatlán, and are students at the local high school.  Their video is moving and they worked very hard to piece it together.  We are so proud!  Please ost the video and share it; they made the video to make positive change for their communities and we want to help spread the word.

To learn more about the process, watch the video we created on the workshop process.

Video Workshops: An Inside Look

We are really excited to share this short video about the process and participants of our video workshops.  Consider this a trailer for the videos they created which we should be posting soon!  As always, we look forward to feedback and questions.  We plan to publish our video workshop methodology, which is popular education based, once it is more refined.

A2S Keeps Growing: Steve(o) is here.

I made it to Guadalajara! This week was spent adjusting, catching up with my sweet pals Sarah and Arthur. We’ve known each other for nearly 5 years and are incredibly exicted to finally be collaborating after following each others’ work for so long. My name is Steve Fisher and I now coordinate interviews and promote community outreach for A2S (Adapting to Scarcity). I’ll be working with them for at least three months. My background is in Latin American politics, anthropology, and popular education. Check out my bio to learn more about me.

Yesterday we went out to Juanacátlan where I saw (and smelled) why we have to use gas masks to film near the river. I also talked with Rodrigo, an incredible community organizer who explained some of the issues they were dealing with in regards to the Rio Santiago. I’ll be living in Juanacátlan part-time doing the prep work for workshops and filming.

Read more »

Friday Unveiling of “Con Ojos de Niñas y Niños”

La Huizachera photo exposition, “Con Ojos de Niños” (Through the Eyes of Children) opens in the municipio of El Salto on Friday!  Photograph titles are being finalized and mounting solutions investigated to easily move the photos among a variety of spaces (schools, central plaza, and cultural center).  Below are the final 26 photos.  As soon as the titles are set in the next day or two, we will post them.

Read more »

Reexamining our Work, Releasing Tension and Renewing Hope

Arthur and I just returned from IMDEC’s five day conference on ’systematization’ at a Franciscan monastery located on the outskirts of Guadalajara.  In a nutshell, systematization is a popular education methodology for reexamining organizational and personal work, releasing tension and emotions, and renewing hope. The workshop doubled as group therapy for the attending popular educators, social-cultural actors and activists; rich in cultural realizations and, for us, a serious language lesson.

Read more »

Popular Education Conference

IMDEC hosted a Latin American wide popular education conference this weekend to mark their 45th anniversary as an organization.  It was an incredibly rich and hopeful conference, and also an exhausting experience for us to film and listen to Spanish for 12 hours a day.  Popular education leaders from Cuba, Costa Rica, Panama, Paraguay, El Salvador, Colombia, and many states within Mexico came to present, listen, and engage.

The warmth, dedication, and down to earth nature of the popular education leaders made the field of popular education even more exciting.  The conference ended with a Día de los Muertos influenced celebration at IMDEC’s headquarters (check out the beautiful altar we got to help make to the left), and included a deeply touching Mayan Día de los Muertos ceremony, musical and dance performances by conference participants, and two live bands with lots of fabulous dancing.  In case there were any doubts – popular educators definitely know how to get down. Read more »

Estamos en Guadalajara

We arrived safe and sound in Guadalajara last night.  All of our equipment arrived as well, still in working order (as they say in Mexico, “Gracias a Dios”).  For the next two weeks we’ll be in clases de Espanol, and then we’ll be able to devote all our time to the project.

There is a lot more to come in the following weeks, so visit us again virtually!  We also keep a page on Facebook with updates, which can be accessed on the sidebar of this page.

Read more »

hello, i’m arthur

I’d like to take this opportunity to introduce myself – consider it an e-handshake: my name is Arthur Richards and I am the co-director of Adapting to Scarcity.

Since the inception of Adapting to Scarcity, I’ve helped Sarah flesh out some of the overarching ideas and goals of the project. Over the past few months, I’ve taken on a more integral role; helping to make bigger decisions about direction, logistics and the technologies we’ll be using. Due to previous professional obligations and time constraints, my presence and influence has been primarily behind the scenes. Now, I have taken the plunge and am fully immersed in the project.
Read more »