This month we received a very special visit to our community center. Click to watch the video from the visit!

We are excited to announce CIELO will be sponsoring CEPC Toliman's first paid employee. Jose Fransisco will be joining the team in February to oversee operations and maintenance of the community center.

Thanks to generous contributions from our donors & the dedicated efforts of CEPC Toliman on the ground, we were able to provide emergency food aid and sanitary supplies for the Maya community of Quixaya as they endure a devastating outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic.

We are excited to announce we have been selected to join the inaugural cohort of the GreenCheck Network! GreenCheck is a climate action network run by passionate students from Yale-NUS university in Singapore.

This solar oven doesn't need gas or electricity. It cooks food by concentrating solar energy! We used the solar oven to make a delicious rice, using ingredients dried in the solar dehydrator.

This low tech solution can dry herbs, fruits, and veggies without any electricity. Drying helps produce last longer for families. Plus, farmers get better prices for value added products (like herb mixes and dried fruit) than selling harvests straight out of the ground.

We built a dry composting toilet for the community permaculture center. This is an ecological solution that treats human waste without using water. This means we don't waste clean drinking water to flush toilets. We also we don't contaminate the local river with our wastewater.

To help fight the spread of COVID-19, we dropped off sanitary supplies at the permaculture center (masks, disinfecting alcohol, and soap). As COVID-19 spreads through the community, all of our workshops and educational activities have been put on hold. While we can't hold activities in groups, we've decided to respond to the pandemic by providing emergency food aid to the families in our community most in need.

We built a community chicken coop! The first harvest generated $600 in profit which was reinvested back into the project. The profits were also used to build a small home scale chicken coop for a family in need. This is a great example of how donations to CIELO are used to increase food security and independence for local families.

We planted over 4000 trees in our nursery. These seedlings will grow bigger in the nursery until May, when they will be planted in the ground in our food forest. The varieties include soursop, avocado, citrus, cacao, yuca, passionfruit, morera, and quixtan.