Over the last decade, entrepreneurship programs have proven to be an effective strategy to fight poverty in various contexts, but what happens when these programs are meant for Mapuche people? The purpose of this article was to analyze the cultural characteristics, opportunities, and associated challenges of entrepreneurship programs aimed at Mapuche people in rural and urban areas of Chile, based on the experiences and meanings of their beneficiaries. To fulfill this objective, a qualitative study was conducted, providing an in-depth examination of the experiences of 17 Mapuche people who have participated in entrepreneurship interventions in the Metropolitan and Bio Bio Regions, Chile. The article describes the initial conditions of the enterprises and the general contribution of the programs, the geographic and cultural characteristics associated with the development of their enterprises, the points of agreement and tensions between the business world and the Mapuche world, the aspects of the programs that reinforce Mapuche entrepreneurship, and the distinctive effects of entrepreneurship as implemented by Mapuche people. Points of agreement and challenges associated with interculturality in the field of entrepreneurship and social programs are discussed, as well as notions of culture, cultural identity, and recognition.
Much research has identified the difficulties of promoting women’s empowerment using microcredit, but there has been little research on the potential for empowerment from promoting women’s savings. We address this gap through a qualitative study of three women’s savings programmes in the Highlands of Peru. The results reveal changes in several domains of women’s lives (economic, personal and relational), emphasizing that these programmes enable them to think about the future, expand their social support networks, and become entrepreneurs. We conclude that savings interventions have considerable advantage over microcredit programmes for facilitating female empowerment and that the merits of these interventions go far beyond financial inclusion with significant impacts on women’s psychosocial well-being and broader empowerment.
The literature establishes the importance of care in the context of situations leading to burnout. However, there are theoretical limitations that make it difficult to understand its role within the social area. The article presents a proposal to conceptualize and address care in social policies from a comprehensive perspective, based on the community praxis of psychosocial teams. Results came from evaluating a care intervention with 35 participants from three teams focused on homeless people and two teams that worked with relatives of prison inmates. Interviews and focus groups were held, which were then analyzed Grounded Theory methods. As for the questions "Who is being taken care of?" and "Who is in charge of providing care?," four instances were defined: Workers, teams, self-care, and joint care. The article discusses the scope and theoretical challenges of care, as well as the key role played by institutions in care in community-based professional praxis. In addition, the authors reflect on the importance of comprehensive care for community psychology in today's social interventions.
Given the relevance of the bonds established between intervention agent and participant during the implementation of programmes with a psychosocial component, we studied an emblematic Chilean programme to overcome poverty based on psychosocial and community support: the Families Program. The participants were 21 people: 10 dyads composed of the program participants and their respective intervention agents, plus the head of the intervention team. We employed a qualitative methodology, conducted semi‐structured interviews, and performed descriptive and relational analysis following grounded theory guidelines. This process resulted in a comprehensive model of the strengthening of the bond established between intervention agent and participant. This model delimits three relevant dimensions of the agent–participant bond—technical, affective, and interactional—and we describe how they are articulated during the transition from an administrative relationship to a technical‐affective bond. Lastly, we discuss the processual and temporal construction of the bond as well as the relevance of considering its three dimensions. Likewise, we reflect on bonds as a way of humanizing psychosocial interventions and ponder the challenge of generating a progressive de‐bonding that fosters participants' autonomy.
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