InDios Cooperative
Sr. Teresa Auad, Director
P.O. Box 901
Indiantown, Fla. 34956
(407) 597-3838
(407) 597-4645 fax

One of the many programs inspired by the work of Father Frank O'Laughlin at Holy Cross Parish in Indiantown, Fla., InDios has long since spun off as an independent, profit-seeking (and sometimes even profit-making) organization.

Fr. O'Laughlin, as detailed in the Reinvesting in America report on the Hope Rural School, was an innovative, caring pastor who came to Indiantown some 25 years ago, where he found an achingly poor community of impoverished farm workers and migrant citrus pickers -- largely of Mexican heritage with a growing corps of Guatemalan immigrants -- eking out a bare existence with little money, terrible living conditions, and virtually no support.

Over the years, he encouraged the development of a number of model programs aimed at bringing the region's migrants pride and self-reliance, including El Centro, a multi-purpose service center; low-cost housing initiatives; pre-school child-development programs; and the Hope Rural School, an effort to break the cycle of poverty by offering the next generation a chance at a high-quality education in a county where no one in the public schools even spoke Spanish.

However, Fr. O'Laughlin (who has since moved on to a parish in Boynton Beach, Fla.) would willingly share credit for one of the community's most effective programs: InDios, a play on the Spanish words for "Indian" -- honoring the Guatemalan/Mayan heritage of many participants -- and "In God" ("In Dios").

Sr. Teresa, born in Bolivia and a Dominican sister, recalls that she was looking for an assignment back in 1983 when Fr. O'Laughlin called her with a challenge: The Hope Rural School was doing a great job with the children who stayed through the school year, but many of them were losing out when their parents moved north with the "migrant stream," pulling the youngsters out of school when the harvest beckoned. If they could come up with a program that would create work for at least one parent, Father reasoned, that parent could stay home in Indiantown, earning a living and making a permanent home for the youngsters while the other parent followed the migrant stream.

O'Laughlin thought perhaps that a weaving cooperative would be just right, but it didn't take Sr. Teresa long to discover that the Indiantown Guatemalans -- unlike some of their compatriots from other regions back home -- didn't know anything about weaving. "They weren't weavers, they were mostly smugglers," she said with a laugh. So she spent a year working alongside the Guatemalan families in the fields and groves, trying to find out what kind of cooperative would work. "They said, 'sewing,' 'sewing,' 'sewing,' she said, laughing again. "I didn't want to do sewing, but here we are."

Indeed. Although the sewing cooperative got off to a slow start until the women found their bearings, things took off quickly after a local priest asked them to sew him a set of clerical shirts. The demand for this product proved so high that they quickly had all the work they could handle. With the help of a Boston advertising firm that donated its resources to make a slick, professional brochure, InDios now reaches Lutheran, Episcopalian and Catholic clergy in all 50 states with 5,000 pieces of mail-order advertising per month -- enough to generate $8,000 to $10,000 in revenue per month, which is sufficient to pay the cooperative's nine members a piecework rate of $8 to $15 per shirt, at a rate of one shirt every one to two hours. Members pay a token $20 per month as shares in the co-op, and participate in all of its work and management.

Some months, InDios breaks even. Some months, it doesn't. When sales fall below costs, Sr. Teresa says, "I pray." But so far, it has managed to remain self-supporting, despite its situation as a profit-making enterprise that seeks no charitable funding.

InDios is making a big difference in the lives of a few women. Meanwhile, though, freed from its daily management because the co-op's own members have taken over, Sr. Teresa has moved on to an impressive variety of other initiatives under the umbrella of InDios Inc., a 501(c)3 non-profit related to, but separate from, the cooperative. In this venture, she has qualified as a real-estate agent (but declined to seek a state license, which would require her to charge commissions that she does not want to charge), and works with Indiantown's Guatemalan immigrants to help them qualify for decent housing and learn to keep and maintain it.

She has also inspired the organization of the Indiantown Neighborhood Association, a group of some 80 Guatemalan and Mexican immigrant homeowners who are wiping out negative stereotypes of Latino immigrants in the community by cleaning up and brightening their neighborhood with sweat and pride.

Finally, in the face of welfare "reform," Sr. Teresa is helping scores of immigrants seek naturalization; she works two evenings a week, one-on-one with applicants to ensure that the detailed paperwork that the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service requires will pass muster.

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.

Browse his book, Reinvesting In America, at Amazon.com.

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