Organization description
The Corner Institute was founded by Ellen Calmus in 1998 as an educational resource center for campesino children. When area youths got involved and began initiating projects, an educational exchange program evolved that brought groups from the U.S. to learn from the local community and share their skills. In 2004 a series of requests for crisis assistance from families of migrants to the U.S. alerted us to an emerging problem for the most vulnerable families in an area relatively new to migration. The Corner Institute responded by initiating programs using the new communications technologies to help families stay in touch with migrant relatives in the U.S. and deal with problems before they turn into family-fragmenting crises. Our summer program helps migrant children cope with parents’ absence and encourages them to stay in school, while Malinalco’s master artisans who help teach these children work with our growing team to design and produce beautiful hand-crafted products for domestic and export sales, thus creating local earning opportunities. We’ve been especially pleased when our assistance helps reunite area migrants with their families, and take pride in the fact that our team includes returned migrants, who find in the production of our fine hand-crafted products a way to help support their families. Since 2005 the Corner Institute has found that focusing on the challenges faced by the families and children of migrants from our region has provided an effective way to help those in greatest need while beginning to create earning opportunities and explore new options for this area’s future development.
