The Gathering Place
Angela Bianco, Coordinator
Box 838
Thoreau, N.M. 87323
(505) 862-8075

The back room of the 83-year-old trading post building that houses The Gathering Place looks a lot like your grandmother's attic -- or, to be more exact, what your grandmother's attic would look like if she just happened to be a Navajo and a very good artist indeed.

Works of fine American Indian arts and crafts fill every nook and cranny of the large room: Navajo blankets with their spare, muted geometrical designs ... sleek wood tables with colorful sand art inlaid under safety glass ... dolls and pottery and rugs and shirts, and lovable patchwork teddy bears, with constellations of Ojibway "dreamcatchers" rustling overhead. It's all the work of more than 30 Navajo artists and crafts people, who earned an estimated $25,000 last year by producing quality arts and crafts for sale through a cooperative venture.

Out here in the high desert country of western New Mexico, where rugged red mesas jut out of a sere and strangely beautiful countryside that seems to have been painted by an artist whose palette contained mostly blues and reds and shades of brown, there's a lot of poverty and not much hope of employment other than through art and craftsmanship, which probably makes up at least part of the income for more than half of the Navajo population, Angela Bianco said. The people are young (median age under 26) and poor (up to one-third of them are unemployed) and marginally literate (fifth grade achievement, on average, with illiteracy endemic among the older people). Alcoholism and teen pregnancy and domestic abuse are common, and services in the sparsely populated rural area are thinly spread.

Into this setting in 1987 came The Gathering Place, a dream of Bianco (a Sister of Loretto who had worked in social services at a local mission) and a group of Navajo people, who saw all the poverty and realized that if anything was to be done about it, it would have to be done by the people themselves. The first priority was jobs, and that led directly to establishment of the co-op -- first involving a group of quilters, then expanding quickly to add other sewing components, carpentry, and eventually a cooperative marketing venture for a variety of arts and crafts people. The co-op is informal. It doesn't get involved with keeping track of individual shares as in the Mondragon model; rather, it provides training when necessary, technical support and advice, and joint marketing and publicity for the participants, each of whom sells finished crafts to the co-op for resale at a markup to the tourists who flood past the little town of Thoreau on Interstate 40 -- 20,000 of them a day during the May to December tourist season, state officials say.

The co-op has marked considerable success in terms of prizes for some of its artists and pride for all its members, Bianco says. Financially, it's less so, mainly because they've been unable to market and publicize the arts sufficiently to attract enough business to make a full-time living for anyone. In the future, they hope to raise money to hire a full-time co-op manager to try to change that.

Meanwhile, moreover, The Gathering Place is about much more than just arts and crafts alone. As a multiple-purpose organization aimed at Navajos improving their own lives, it operates two other major projects, with dreams of more to come.

First, an array of LITERACY programs aims at boosting younger Navajos whose education has been neglected to full functional literacy, and giving older folks who never learned to write their names the tools they need for basic reading and writing. Literacy instructor Clara Begay says more than 3,000 individuals have been reached through the organization's "Pathway Program" (GED instruction); its "Mom the Teacher" program for WIC mothers, which neatly addresses two needs by using clear, understandable parenting-skills materials to teach literacy; and "Keepers of the Beautyway," a separate literacy class designed especially for elderly people who never learned to read.

Another model program, Shima Yazhi ("Little Mother" in Navajo) is similar to the model "barefoot practitioner" concept from Africa that we've seen operating successfully in inner-city Memphis. Navajo women, trained and supervised by a registered nurse, go into their own communities to provide preventive-health information to pregnant and nursing mothers. "We get the new moms," staff member Effie Livingston explained, "before she has the baby, we make sure she gets prenatal care. We make sure she gets the immunizations the baby needs, and the ones she needs, too. Then, if she's qualified for AFDC, WIC, whatever she's eligible for, we make sure she gets it. We keep them for a year, and we also send them to GED."

The Gathering Place does a lot on a tiny staff and limited budget, but they'd like to grow. Although the old trading post (built in 1911, a year before New Mexico became a state) is a comfortable home and only costs $150 a month, it can't physically be expanded, and it doesn't meet state standards to house the day-care center that they'd like to add. So, starting with a bid for a $50,000 challenge grant from the Sisters of Loretto, they're hoping to raise $300,000 over the next three years to put up a new building that would house the existing programs, a Montessori day-care center, an American Indian "college without walls," and on top of it all, a central location for many other local social-service programs to provide "one-stop shopping" for the region's people.

All the feature stories on @GRASS-ROOTS.ORG's pages are reported and written by Robin Garr, a prize-winning journalist who has visited more than 500 innovative grassroots programs in all 50 states since 1990.

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