The Magazine

Weaving Change: Women Who Transform Through Care

The illustrations on the following pages portray care as a vital force, a practice that connects the land, memory, and the hands of women who have made, and continue to make, the construction of a country that recognizes the value of care possible. In so-called “Colombia”, care has historically been a central practice for the sustainability of life, though its social and political dimensions have rarely been acknowledged. From their territories, women have developed knowledge, strategies, and forms of organization that help sustain community balance. Understanding care from this perspective means seeing it as a system that weaves together relationships, values, and collective knowledge, not merely as a domestic or individual task. That is why the women who care, resist, and weave community from their territories are true change makers: they transform realities, sustain life, and reimagine the future through the power of care.

Where Care is Woven

Tejiendo Cuidados (“Weaving Care”) is a project led by women from different regions of Colombia that seeks to make visible and better understand Indigenous peoples’ knowledge and practices of care, so that their voices and experiences can enrich the creation of the ethnic chapter of the country’s National Care System. This system aims to guarantee the right to care and to be cared for under dignified conditions, recognizing and valuing both collective and individual forms of care.

The initiative has been built upon the knowledge of more than 50 caregivers who have carried out transformative work in their territories, even in the face of internal conflicts, armed violence, and state neglect. Through their practices, these women have kept community networks alive, recovered ancestral knowledge about health, food, and spirituality, and strengthened collective forms of organization and mutual support.

In Colombia”, women sustain life with their struggles, their voices, their words, their bodies, and their territories,  even though this work has long gone unrecognized by the State and undervalued in decisions affecting collective well-being.

Tejiendo Cuidados seeks not only to document this knowledge, but also to promote actions of recognition, representation, redistribution, reduction, and compensation for women’s work, often done in silence or resistance. The project understands that care is not merely an individual or domestic duty, but rather a collective, ancestral, and political fabric, sustained for generations by grandmothers, mothers, daughters, leaders, and wise women.

The Grandmothers

This process acknowledges the importance of grandmothers as bearers of wisdom that reveals how care is woven into the everyday life of communities. In the Andean region, Blanca Yenny, a Misak woman, community governor, and math teacher, explains that care is conceived as a spiral: those who came before are still present. “Our elders do not fade into memory — they stay, weaving,” says Blanca Yenny. Thus, care is understood as a collective system that includes listening to others, to nature, and to oneself.

In the Caribbean region, Melany—a Palenquera woman, lawyer, activist, and leader of the organization Kusuto—recounts how the burden of care has rested for generations on the women of her family: “Care is what we do every day, what our grandmothers did. My grandmother cared for me through the sale of cocadas, through resistance. To speak of care is to speak of them, of those who care for us through their ancestral wisdom.”

These testimonies show that care is a social and political practice that generates collective transformation. The intergenerational transmission of knowledge helps sustain cultural continuity and strengthens community organization. Grandmothers represent the origin of a wisdom that guides both present and future change.

The Women of the Desert, the Sea, the Jungle, and the Highlands

The women from different regions who participate in Tejiendo Cuidados are building, from their territories, a vast fabric that gathers their knowledge, experiences, and practices of care. Each contributes a unique thread, yet all work toward the same purpose: to sustain life and make visible the value of care as the foundation of communities.

The project has shown that care is a guiding thread running through health, education, food, spirituality, and the relationship with the environment. Through regional gatherings, women have shared how the teachings of their grandmothers, mothers, and daughters have upheld practices that ensure collective well-being. This fabric of knowledge has now become a political and cultural proposal, one that seeks to include their voices in the design of public policies, recognizing care as a force for social transformation and not merely as a private or domestic task.

The National Care System formally acknowledges these practices, but its true transformation will depend on something deeper: listening to and valuing the knowledge that women have always been weaving in their territories. Without that recognition, the future of collective care—and therefore of life’s very sustainability—would remain incomplete.

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About the Artist

Laura Martínez was born and raised in the Colombian Caribbean and identifies herself as a sentimental artist. Her work stands as a political bet, where social criticism and protest art are the pillars on which she builds her narrative.

Laura firmly believes in the transformative power of art and in the capacity of each individual to contribute to social change. She has a clear commitment to what she loves and believes in and therefore trusts in the construction (for many utopian) of a better future. “The social function of the artist is to provoke and encourage humanity, that’s why I decided from full awareness that my task in this world is to CREATE instead of answering.”