Sponsor a mom today and help her access the care and support she needs!

This Mother’s Day, your gift can support a mom in Shandia for a full year through the Mamitas program—providing education, nutrition, and community for her and her child.

Every gift, no matter the size, supports a mother and her child—and monthly giving helps sustain that support all year long.

Donate below, or give using Venmo, googlepay, microsoftpay or ApplePay! To donate by EFT/ACH to avoid processing fees, please donate HERE.

What Is Mamitas?

Mamitas is a monthly maternal health and peer support program for mothers and pregnant women in Shandia, an indigenous Kichwa community in the Ecuadorian Amazon. Led by local healthcare providers including a doctor, nutritionist, and midwife, each session covers essential topics like prenatal care, breastfeeding, infant nutrition, and complementary feeding.

Through the program, mothers participate in hands-on cooking demonstrations using locally available, iron-rich foods, receive take-home resources in both Spanish and Kichwa, and build real relationships with the healthcare workers and fellow mothers around them. Also at the heart of the program is a Peer Champion model that invests in mothers as leaders, ensuring Mamitas is built to last long after any outside support ends.

Since launching in 2025, the program has already shown promising results — with participating mothers reporting increased confidence, stronger relationships with local healthcare providers, and a greater sense of community support during one of the most important seasons of their lives.

April Mamitas Session

This month, Mamitas had record attendance with almost 30 moms joining!

Peer Champions in Training!

This month we also had our first workshop to train a selected group of women from the Mamitas group to become Peer Champions — women who will now support other mothers, lead activities during sessions, and help carry the program forward from within.

Cooking Demonstration

The Mamitas program also includes healthy cooking demonstrations led by a local nutritionist using accessible ingredients.

Dynamic Activities

During monthly sessions, moms get to participate in dynamic activities to reinforce what they’ve discussed — after all, learning should be fun!

Why Does It Matter?

In Ecuador, chronic malnutrition affects 23% of children under five — more than double the Latin American average. Indigenous women face a maternal mortality rate more than two and a half times higher than non-indigenous women in the same country. And across Napo Province's indigenous communities, nearly 1 in 5 children under two faces chronic malnutrition, with fewer than half of those who need care completing the treatment required to recover.

In Shandia, the need is urgent and specific. Anemia is the second most common reason families seek care at the local health center. More than 1 in 4 pregnancies is an adolescent pregnancy. Over 60% of pregnant women are classified as high-risk, largely because they arrive too late for prenatal care, already undernourished. And roughly 1 in 3 births still happens at home, often without medical support, because families lack the resources or transportation to get to a hospital in time.

The first 1,000 days — from pregnancy through a child's second birthday — are the most critical window for brain development and lifelong health. What a mother learns, eats, and experiences during this time shapes her child's future in ways that are difficult, and sometimes impossible, to reverse.

Mamitas is how Shandia is changing that.

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