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The “Disfruta y Ayuda” Campaign was the result of an agreement between PADF and Anheuser Busch, to carry out an innovative community-based fundraising campaign with the Salvadoran immigrant community in the Washington, DC area.
As part of the USAID- supported project “Building Capacity of Immigrants to Serve as Development Actors in Latin America and the Caribbean,” in 2003 and 2004, PADF worked with several Salvadoran Hometown Associations (HTAs) to help create jobs and increase incomes for families from five agricultural cooperatives in the area of San Pedro Masahuat in El Salvador.
Anheuser Busch contributed by supporting a two-month campaign starting in 2004, in which they donated $0.15 for every Budweiser and Bud Light bottle sold in a participating Salvadoran restaurant in the Washington, DC area. PADF and its partners coordinated with the Salvadoran restaurants and sought the help of various community-based organizations to promote the campaign. The campaign was a success. It generated almost $6,000 which was used to help build a processing plant for local agricultural products.
The project in San Pedro Masahuat was designed to teach the participants new ways to diversify their agricultural production and cultivate crops using organic growing methods. With the diversified production, local farmers had opportunities to competitively sell their crops of loroco, passion fruit, green chilies, and other goods on the local market in El Salvador with long-term goals of exporting products to the nostalgia market in Washington, DC.
As noted in a Washington Post Article, this project was “part of an experiment in changing how Salvadoran immigrants in the United States help people back in El Salvador.”
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