FUNDING:

The overall speed of progress is a function of monetary funding. For example in the first part of the project we set up a workshop and trained a carpenter to make spinning wheels. This took a long time because the funding was absolutely minimal. All the equipment was made by us, mostly at weekends and so on. Progress could only be made as money and time became available. Overall it took an excruciating 15 months to complete this stage.

If the money had been available to buy the equipment outright, and to pay a specialist to do my job running the printing workshop, we could have been producing spinning wheels in less than 5 months. Apart from the fact that I had no choice, I don't at all regret having done it the hard way because as a result we have custom made equipment better than we could have bought and a better spinning wheel to show for it, but nevertheless I didn't foresee that it would take us quite that long. As they say, hind sight is 20/20.

I do very much want to learn from this experience now that we have entered on the second stage of the project and have other people involved. We are promising a lot to the Huichol, and it is going to cost a lot of money to fulfil this promise, and we can only proceed as fast as money comes available, for this reason looking for funds has become an important issue.

One important way for us to raise funds is by selling spinning wheels. Since we have developed such a fine quality wheel, it is likely that we could find a market for it. Also in the long run this should be our best source of finance, however in the short term we have no capital to work with and we are still in the hand to mouth situation that caused us last year to take so long setting up. This is the time when we urgently need funding from other sources, as far as possible with no strings attached. This would speed the project up very considerably by supplying immediate capital to get moving. For this reason we are currently starting a non profit making organisation called ARTLANA A.C.