It’s a typically rainy afternoon in Guatemala City.  A plastic basket with cookies wrapped in white cloth sits on a round table.   There are two desks, where two young women in their mid-twenties sit, typing away at their laptops and eating lunch at their desks as they try to get everything done.  It looks like an ordinary office until one notices the posters adorning the walls, proudly declaring slogans like “! Ni Una Mas ! Justicia Para las Mujeres en Guatemala (Not One More! Justice for the Women in Guatemala).” 

After hanging around for a few more minutes, one might notice the constant circulation of women who come in and out throughout the day.  The women sit down with the two staff-members, Executive Director Ana Moraga and Program Coordinator Wendy Rosales, spilling the recent news and gossip and chatting away about their lives.  They have ups and downs like any other woman I know.  They might bring up concerns about their children not attending school, or anxieties they’re having about their family members’ financial troubles.  So what’s special about this organization?  The women come from one of most marginalized groups of women in Guatemala (not to mention the rest of the world).  The women are sex workers.

MuJER, which stands for Mujeres por la Justicia, Educación, y Reconocimiento (Women for Justice, Education, and Awareness), is a small non-profit organization dedicated to assisting women sex workers in Guatemala City in empowering themselves through classes ranging from literacy courses to beauty certification courses.  MuJER also advocates for the human rights of sex workers.  Fundraising, as for many non-profit organizations, is a key ingredient in MuJER’s success.  But the serious challenges inherent in trying to raise donations with such a tiny full-time staff, a challenging and unique mission, and a clientele of low-income, and often socially rejected women are undeniable. 

The question, then, is how does such a small, under-resourced organization raise enough funds and make enough of an impression on potential donors to sustainably achieve its objectives and provide its services to the women?  The answer lies in the Internet. 

MuJER is merely four years old.  It has 501(c)3 status in the United States so that Americans can make tax-deductible donations to the organization.  One of MuJER’s main fundraising goals is to market itself to American donors, as there are many US donors who are interested in global human rights issues (not to mention that there are significantly larger numbers of donors ready and willing to donate to non-profit organizations in the US than there are in Guatemala).  But how would someone in the US even learn of MuJER?  And why would anyone from the US contribute to MuJER over other organizations? 

These were some of the important questions Ana Moraga, the co-founder and Executive Director of MuJER, had to grapple with over the past few years so that this past summer, when I arrived as an intern, the first task on my list was to assist in the redesigning of the website.  MuJER’s original website was not especially inviting, interactive, or informative.  Donating was not really possible through the site and there were no profiles of the women, very few pictures, and only a brief summary of how the organization was founded and what its goals were. 

Throughout the summer, the web-designer Walter Aguilar, Ana Moraga, and I set out to recreate MuJER as an internationally connected, socially networked, interactive, and trailblazing organization that would inspire donors to donate, volunteers to volunteer, and others to simply read, discover, and get to know the organization.  We completely redesigned the website (mujerguatemala.org) adding pictures, personal and inspirational stories from the women, information on the challenges facing sex workers in Guatemala, and an online store selling the jewelry the women make in their jewelry workshop (jewelry is bought through PayPal or Google Checkout).  The site was built on WordPress, a free, open source web design system that makes it easy for non-techies to contribute to changes on the site.  

“Through the website, people actually know about us in the States,” says Moraga.  “We just got a volunteer who is going to be with us for a year and she found out about us through the website,” she cheerfully remarks. 

With the new website up and running, we realized that MuJER could potentially connect with many more people if it diversified its use of social networking tools.  Thus, we created a facebook page and a twitter account and invited friends from near and far to join the group. 

While these are all important accomplishments for an organization like MuJER, there are countless more steps the organization can take to increase its online readership, self-advocacy, and fundraising potential.  When I left in August, I couldn’t help but feel anxious about the fate of the organization’s Internet connectedness.   I was leaving, Moraga was planning on moving to the States in October, and we were both concerned about who would keep the website, facebook page, and twitter account active and up to date. 

The problem many small non-profits face lies in the lack of staff time available to make full use of all of the good the Internet can bring to an organization.  Without updates, tweets, wall posts, and blog entries, potential supporters in the US might lose interest and forget about an organization as geographically distant and unknown to the US public as MuJER.  As a former intern, I have an immense amount of respect and appreciation for the incredible work MuJER has done and is still doing with and for sex workers in Guatemala, but I worry about it not accomplishing as much as it can if it doesn’t find a way to keep up with the pack.  Hopefully this won’t be the case.