Jackie Gilbert

Since I was a little kid, I knew that I was here to help. I was here to support people. I've always known that, but I went through different phases, first thinking that my job was to work in inner-city schools in the US. Then I became obsessed with environmental activism and fighting climate change. Then I started working with water rights activists, and then I started working with these mining-impacted communities. But the thread that linked everything was exploitation and justice, and social justice.

I've always been a great writer, and I can sit and in one sitting write the most eloquent piece about my work. And then when I have to use my voice to say it out loud, the words struggle to come out. So a lot of my purpose work has been realizing that I do have a message that is worth sharing, and I need to stop worrying about how it comes out, and just channel that deep desire to do good for the world.

I had to respond to the request because I was there to be of service, and that was what I was being asked to do. They had all the answers all along. They just needed support with putting their ideas into action. Every single month, the leaders of each weaving team come to our office in Riohacha and they receive their new projects. They hand in last month's projects. They receive payment that's seven times the market value. They also have access to skill-building workshops and educational programs that help them become leaders of their communities.

To live my purpose, I've had to overcome a lot of fears, a lot of insecurities. Not only insecurities over money, which I was already mentioning, but insecurities about talking, about using my voice. A lot of my purpose work has been realizing that I do have a message that is worth sharing, and I need to stop worrying about how it comes out, and just channel that deep desire to do good for the world.

Money has always been a struggle for me. I grew up in a family that lived paycheck to paycheck, and making ends meet was a struggle for as long as I can remember. So I always found it difficult to juggle living in my purpose and being impactful and doing purposeful work and surviving. For many years I worked 80 hours a week, multiple jobs, in order to start doing this work in Colombia. And then the other struggle when you grow up not having much money is not valuing your work and not feeling that you're deserving of more money. So the biggest learning curve for me, with being the director of a nonprofit, is asking people for money. I've had to really do a lot of therapy and overcome shame around asking for money because now I realize it's not about me getting money. It's about my ability to support these women.

I was in Colombia originally as an activist, as an organizer, and I was a Fulbright researcher. I was there to fight against the largest coal mine in the world with a bunch of frontline defenders from Wayuu communities, indigenous communities that were displaced by the mine, and Afro-Colombian communities. I realized that giving women income is a way to be part of the social movement against the coal mine. Because if these communities are strong, and they have their own sources of income, and they don't have to rely on handouts from corrupt politicians and from mining companies, then we can maybe prevent communities from being so vulnerable in the first place.

When I was working with this one particular mining-impacted community, they asked me for help with selling their bags. And I initially was like, no, I'm not a salesperson. I'm an anthropologist. I'm a researcher. I'm an activist. I don't know anything about selling. I don't know anything about marketing. I don't know anything about using social media. But I had to respond to the request because I was there to be of service, and that was what I was being asked to do. So working with weavers really found me, and it's never what I expected to be doing. In fact, I resisted it for a while. But today I love this work so much, and it gives me energy. It gives me purpose.

OneThreadCollective

On my recent trip to Colombia, visiting the Wayuu communities that we work with with One Thread Collective, I realized that my purpose here in this life is actually to stop exploitation. I work with over a hundred women in La Guajira, Colombia, weavers who make beautiful bags. Our job at One Thread Collective is to help women reclaim their power and step back into their identity as weavers, and to earn a fair wage selling their beautiful works of art. We do that by giving women income every single month and basically cutting out the middleman and connecting rural artisans that live in communities that are hours away from the city, connecting them to people in the US and abroad who are interested in paying a fair living wage. So living in my purpose actually has a generational impact that will live on.