Mijenta Tequila and Women’s Earth Alliance Share Initial Grant Recipients, Continue Partnership to Support Women Leaders in Mexico
April 1, 2024 – In honor of Earth Month, Mijenta Tequila, the award-winning, sustainable and additive-free tequila from the highlands of Jalisco, announced today that it is continuing its partnership with Women’s Earth Alliance (WEA), which empowers women’s leadership to protect the environment, end the climate crisis, and ensure a just, thriving world. In addition, Mijenta and WEA shared the organizations that have been awarded funding through WEA’s Regenerative Agriculture & Health Accelerator program in Mexico.
For this phase of the partnership, from April 1 through April 30, a portion of Mijenta's sales proceeds will go to support WEA's ongoing work in Mexico. During this period, Mijenta will donate to WEA $1.00 from each bottle depleted to help fund this initiative. For the first time, Mijenta will also introduce its “Drinks on Mijenta” program, which offers consumers who purchase Mijenta an opportunity to donate to WEA or receive a rebate – either $8 for a bottle purchased at retail or $3 when purchasing a cocktail*. Shoppers will have the option to keep their rebate (via Venmo or PayPal) or donate to WEA.
Building on 17 years of global experience, WEA’s Regenerative Agriculture & Health Accelerator brings together women leaders working at the intersection of land, health, and gender. Uplifting women’s leadership, entrepreneurship, and environmental impact within the regenerative food and health sectors, the Regenerative Agriculture & Health Accelerator invests in women-led initiatives so their solutions can scale, replicate, and reach a global audience. With Mijenta’s support, WEA has provided funding to the following projects in Mexico:
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Las Cañadas Bosque de Niebla is an agroecological cooperative in Veracrúz that hosts courses and apprentice programs to enable community members to learn about and adopt sustainable and regenerative agriculture practices. Since 1994, Las Cañadas has conserved 260 hectares of cloud forest — one of the world's most biodiverse and threatened ecosystems — and implemented a range of agroecological food systems and eco-technologies that allow cooperative members to live sustainably on the land.
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Mujeres de la Tierra, Mujeres de la Periferia is an Indigenous women’s collective in Milpa Alta, an area on the outskirts of Mexico City. Economic dependence, limited access to secondary or higher education, and low rates of land- and home-ownership put women and young people there in a vulnerable situation, where they are particularly impacted by physical and domestic violence fueled by machismo, racism, and classism. Through workshops and awareness-building, Mujeres de la Tierra, Mujeres de la Periferia seeks to shine a light on the various forms of violence that threaten the lives of women and girls, while promoting the importance of caring for the land, good nutrition, and consumption of local products. The members of the collective are dedicated to defending their territory and stewarding the land by embracing traditional agroecological practices and promoting Indigenous foodways based on blue corn, cactus, beans and squash.
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Poj Kää works within the Indigenous Ayuujk community of Tlahuitoltepec, in the Sierra Mixe in Oaxaca. They aim to increase access to traditional Indigenous knowledge in agriculture and medicine, promote biodiversity, and ensure an equitable, sustainable society. Through participatory workshops, Poj Kää supports Ayuujk women, girls, and young people to learn about agro-ecology, medicinal plants, and land rights. They are also supporting community members to create ecological bathrooms and are preserving a botanical garden to promote biodiversity, protect ancestral knowledge about medicinal plants, and revitalize their Indigenous language of Ayuujk.
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Sirenas de Mexico is a new collective being formed by several organizations dedicated to promoting gender equity while protecting Mexico’s precious ocean ecosystems. Communidad y Biodiversidad (COBI) was established in 1999 to promote marine conservation and sustainable fisheries management while working hand in hand with coastal communities and locally-led organizations — organizations like Sirenas de Natividad and Centro Comunitario de Investigación y Monitoreo Submarino (CECIMS). Together, the three organizations are creating a first-of-its-kind network, connecting Mexican women in ocean conservation, providing them with tools for implementing citizen science and monitoring marine biodiversity, and working to ensure safety for women in the industry.
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AfroCaracolas is an anti-racist and Afro-Feminist collective in Guerrero dedicated to protecting and promoting the human rights of Black and Afro-Mexican women from an intersectional perspective. Their work is focused on increasing women’s political participation and economic autonomy, advancing Afro-centric and antiracist narratives, protecting reproductive rights, and fostering environmental justice.
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Unión de Pueblos de Morelos (UPM) is a social and solidarity-building economic initiative that originally formed in the 1980s when representatives from independent farming (or campesino) communities throughout the state of Morelos came together in the hopes of achieving food sovereignty and a more just society. Today, UPM organizes with rural campesinos to help improve crop production and boost local economies — while ensuring that women’s participation in farming and food production leads to their increased economic autonomy. During COVID, the women of UPM created Bazar Campo-Ciudad, an online store through which urban consumers in Cuernavaca (and its surrounding areas) are able to buy fresh, local products from rural producers, ensuring fair pay and increasing access to markets for farm workers whose businesses were severely impacted by the pandemic.
“When we launched WEA’s Mexico Program this month — bringing together the six organizations that we will collaborate closely with over the next three years — we witnessed the power of our global alliance time and time again. During our time together, these organizations developed new connections, and shared knowledge and strategies amongst themselves, weaving into and strengthening the fabric that makes up WEA’s worldwide network. Our partnership with Mijenta supports WEA’s work to uplift the transformative power of women’s environmental leadership while growing and deepening critical networks of women leaders forging a path towards a sustainable and equitable future — for ourselves, for our planet, and for generations to come,” said Daniela Perez, WEA’s North America Program Director.
“What we truly respect and admire about WEA is the thoughtful, holistic approach the organization has taken to addressing the multitude of challenges that women in Mexico’s agricultural sector face. We are extremely proud to contribute to the amazing and vital work being undertaken by the local, women-led organizations participating in the Regenerative Agriculture & Health Accelerator program,” said Elise Som, Mijenta’s Co-Founder and Director of Sustainability. “This Earth Month, we are thrilled to be able to continue to raise funds that will support women working to protect and honor their land, heritage and communities.”
For more information and updates, please visit mijenta-tequila.com and www.womensearthalliance.org or follow Mijenta Tequila on Instagram at Instagram (@mijentatequila) and WEA at Instagram (@womensearthalliance).
About Mijenta
Mijenta is an award-winning, additive-free, sustainable Tequila from the highlands of Jalisco that celebrates the traditions of Mexican culture. Made with only the best ingredients and a meticulous distilling process, Mijenta comprises the essentials of a truly well-crafted tequila: complex, balanced and gastronomic. With community and sustainability at the heart of its mission, Mijenta is the first tequila producer to earn B Corp certification based on its holistic approach to environmental responsibility and development of meaningful and impactful partnerships.
www.instagram.com/mijentatequila
About WEA
Women's Earth Alliance (WEA), founded in 2006, is on a mission to protect our environment, end the climate crisis, and ensure a just, thriving world by empowering women’s leadership. WEA provides leadership, strategy, technical training, and funding for women leaders to scale their climate and environmental justice initiatives while connecting them to a global alliance of peers, mentors, and funders.