UpTica

Infographic by Anna Ostermeier, student intern from the University of Wisconsin in Madison

UpTica is a social venture that creates alternative income sources and learning opportunities for women from rural communities in Pérez Zeledón, Costa Rica. Nicol Chinchilla, from Costa Rica, Sasha Drumm, from Michigan, U.S.A, and I started this venture in 2016 with the support of The Resolution Project. Today, we have fully engaged four local women, three student interns, and multiple local and international collaborators.

The ladies we work with use leftover fabric from local donors, second-hand materials, and natural fabrics to combine with their creativity and produce mainly reusable bags. Our main and most eco-friendly product is our yute bag. Available are other kinds of bags, purses and pencil cases. Other community members who are also part of UpTica make souvenirs from carved wood and bracelets.

UpTica’s student interns Anna Ostermeier, Kyle Powers and Brooke Nelson, continue to provide advice, educational and marketing materials.

Additionally, Kyle Powers, Thomas Bihler, Max Kahn and I, got two prizes at the Wisconsin Energy and Sustainability Challenge in November 2016. We plan on bringing to the communities a robust plastic recycling machine to shred plastic and turn plastic waste into raw material that can be sold to a partner organization. The use of this machine will provide the communities with a new alternative to recycle the plastic and see the entire process rather than sending the plastic waste to a distant facility or burning it to never see it again.

We work with the communities in mind, and communications are a vital part of our operations. Thus, we have the flexibility to change things as we go, but our mission and vision will remain the same.

As part of the Wisconsin Idea Fellowship, during 2016-2017 I did a directed study to learn more about how UpTica fits into the bigger picture of sustainability. With the help of my advisor, Professor Robert Beattie, from the Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies, I developed a report on Promoting Sustainable Development Through UpTica.

UpTica’s main goals fit into the triple bottom line of sustainability (economic, environmental, and social impacts). These goals are:

Empowering women by providing them with alternative income sources (economic);
Introducing upcycling as an approach to value waste (environmental);
Creating opportunities that provide training, mutual encouragement, and personal growth (social);
Increasing gender equality through gender training and cross-gender collaboration (social);
Encouraging a sustainability behavior of reducing the consumption of single use bags (environmental);
Incentivizing community ownership and development in the creation of a local economy (economic).