At all our sites there are entrepreneurial souls waiting to take the first step towards building their own business. Those first steps often start to happen when parents or guardians join Chalice family circles. During their meeting they start to get trained on in demand skills that will open the doors of opportunities. When a parents are able to open a small business, they start to generate income and provide more support to their families.
Our Meru site’s parents were prepared to start their own business, they already had experience in farming- the just needed business training. At Meru site, parents are predominantly farmers – so the gifts of animals, tools, and agricultural training are invaluable gifts from the Chalice Gift Catalogue.
Parents from 30 Chalice family circles in the Meru site were able to start group businesses thanks to catalogue gifts. These new collective enterprises will be in areas such as poultry, goat, pig, or sheep farming, vegetable gardens, and fruit nurseries.
The parents are experts around a farm- business management, on the other hand, is less familiar. So, the Meru site staff wanted to prepare them before they embarked on their lives as entrepreneurs.
Partnering with local groups and a technical college, the site staff arranged a training day for all the parents in the 30 family circles.
The facilitator ran through all the foundational concepts: establishing their collective goals as a group and creating a plan and guidelines to get there. He also helped them understand how to layout and manage their project’s budget.
The members of the groups understand that they will reinvest some of their earnings back into their group kitty, ensuring the project is sustainable.
“All the group members were very happy after getting an enriched, enlightened training from the facilitators,” writes Sr. Rosemary, Meru site director.
The groups each received a small amount of seed capital through Chalice.
“They were very grateful,” Sr. Rosemary says. “It was a motivation for the groups.”
The groups each met with Chalice staff and discussed their plans and ideas. Everyone was ready to start their exciting new ventures.
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