Who We Are
El Telar’s Mission is to support community-based educators and parents with the training, materials, and resources necessary to provide quality, bilingual care and education for children and youth.
Early Childhood Education (ECE) Cooperative Network - early childhood educators and assistants who provide home-based care;
ECE Youth Network - youth studying to become early childhood educators;
Raíces Emma - Erwin Instructors - parents who provide cultural arts education in this afterschool and summer camp program;
Visiting Teachers - artists and culture bearers;
Kaleidoscope Play & Learn - families who participate in this program.
El Telar (“The Loom”
en Inglés) Supports:
El Telar minimizes systemic, economic, and language barriers faced by the members of these groups when seeking training and resources, while strengthening networks of peer support. This helps to ensure that children in our community receive the safe, high quality, culturally competent care they deserve, and tools for a successful future.
El Telar coordinates shared training, materials, and resources to networks of Latinx community-based educators and parents who face systemic barriers due to various factors including ethnicity, language, and economic status. These members of our networks provide bilingual care and education to infants, children, and youth in the Erwin School District and Buncombe County.
El Telar’s staff are Latinas who live in the community and who were originally part of the ECE Cooperative Network, and therefore directly proximate to/part of the community we work with, with lived experience of the needs our work is designed to address. The board of directors of Colaborativa La Milpa is majority Latinx.
Our work is in direct response to community requests. The ECE Network has an organizing committee that manages our shared curriculum boxes and other projects, and the Raíces instructors also actively guide that organization. We use collective decision making and power-sharing processes through the lens of popular education.