About Us

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ABOUT US

The Beginning

La Isla Foundation was formed in 2008 after independent filmmaker Jason Glaser met Juan Salgado, a community organizer from Candelaria, Nicaragua. Jason was in Nicaragua making a film about banana workers when Juan informed him of an epidemic of kidney disease occurring in Candelaria and La Isla ("The Island"), neighboring villages in the municipality of Chichigalpa in western Nicaragua. The disease was ravaging agricultural laborers working on a local sugar-cane plantation. Juan, a former worker on the plantation who was fired when he showed the first signs of kidney disease, introduced Jason to the people of La Isla and Candelaria. Over the following months, Jason watched as, one by one, friends he had made died from kidney failure. He put his film aside and started La Isla Foundation.

Overview

La Isla Foundation is working with officials at the Nicaraguan Ministry of Health (MINSA), Autonomous National University of Nicaragua-León (UNAN-León), and other institutions to attack the Chronic Kidney Disease (CKD) epidemic on all fronts. While we continue to work to provide urgent medical care and health outreach for people suffering from CKD, we are also working to gain greater understanding of the causes of the epidemic and facilitate better treatment for the sick. We are developing sustainable agricultural alternatives that promise new, healthier economic opportunities for people currently condemned to rely on employment on sugar-cane plantations. These organic farming initiatives will also offer widows of La Isla and Candelaria an urgently needed source of income. And to raise funding for our efforts and increase awareness of the epidemic, we have created an international language school and an educational eco-tourism program to be affiliated with universities in the United States.

We seek to gain much greater attention to this crisis by the government of Nicaragua and by Ingenio San Antonio and its parent company, Grupo Pellas (the Pellas Group). The government has been very slow to respond to the epidemic. Beyond the exemplary efforts by Dr. Fernandez and some other local officials, at the national level the government has done very little, despite mandates under international and Nicaraguan law to protect public health and the rights of workers. We will work to ensure that Ingenio San Antonio and Grupo Pellas do much more to abide by labor laws in Nicaragua, international human rights standards, and basic tenets of corporate social responsibility.

We are undertaking our efforts from our office in León, Nicaragua, which we established in April 2008, and from La Isla and Candelaria, where our lead organizers Juan Salgado and María Eugenia Cantillano Romero are based.

León, Nicaragua's oldest city, is only 25 kilometers from Chichigalpa municipality. Our simultaneous presence in both León and Chichigalpa gives us continuous contact both with the communities of La Isla and Candelaria and with researchers at UNAN-León and with other institutions. This dual presence also reflects the Foundation's dual role as both a local community organizing group and a national and international advocacy organization. From our office in León, and through our presence in the communities stricken by chronic renal insufficiency, we fight to support agricultural workers and their families in western Nicaragua.

Location

www.affectedmovie.com

OUR BLOG

La Isla Foundation is now part of Grassroots Journeys - Community Based Tourism !