• Other Global Locations
  • Search
Host an Event
Donate

Young Store Owner in Honduras is an Inspiration to Her Community

on  June 4, 2019

At the young age of 19, Brenda becomes the owner of a stationery store in her home country after being selected as the winner of the USAID Microenterprise Program. Despite her dedication to her job as an entrepreneur, she spends most of her days uplifting her family and residents in Honduras who face a lack of food, education and proper personal care.Growing up in Colonia las Ayestes, Honduras, Brenda lives with her mother and five younger brothers. Like most of the people living in this impoverished area, her family faces many challenges, including a high rate of unemployment. To help her family economically, Brenda makes tortillas daily and sells them with her mother in the local markets. Although her entrepreneurial spirit helped, Brenda and her family were still unable to eat food with nutritional value.Brenda and her family began to attend the outreach program in the neighborhood via Parroquia María Auxiliadora, an organization that receives Rise Against Hunger meals through our partner, Salesians Missions. The center is located in an impoverished area surrounded by 27 communities whose residents struggle to access nutritional food. Through this program, people not only receive daily meals but support for education, trainings for work, life skills, sports arts and integral training. At the community center, they strive to make the people in the community feel like it’s a place they can call home.Guido Alejandro, the program director, explains how providing meals have changed the lives of the people in this community. Since the program began, he’s noticed a shift in social care and health services in the surrounding area. He shares, “Rise Against Hunger meals have deepened our work given the variety of programs we have, which the food supports by supplying energy and the people can focus on their education, rather than trying to find their next meal.”After attending the outreach center for some time and realizing the difference the meals were making for her family, Brenda became a volunteer at Las Ayestas. Through her participation in the program and her willingness to help others, she also found her passion for business. Her winning micro-enterprise project funded by USAID has encouraged her to not only help provide for her family financially, but also to be a role model for others.Deysi Margarita, a program coordinator at the center, expresses how she watched Brenda shine a light on others and continue to be a “constant dreamer with many plans for the future” as she works to improve the lives of those around her.Now working as a volunteer and operating her own business, Brenda is dedicated to helping the people in her community. With the help and support of the program, she was able to graduate from high school. Having educational and work opportunities to break the cycle of poverty is what inspires Brenda to push forward. Her hope is to attend college one day and to pass the torch to her younger brothers so that they can soon follow their dreams, too.”My goal is to graduate from college and improve the quality of my life and those around me,” she says.

About the Author

Janae Curtain is the Manager of Digital Marketing at Rise Against Hunger. Janae leads the development and execution of digital marketing initiatives including social media, email marketing, digital advertising and more!

More Posts by Janae Curtain

Strength, Stability And Hope

The gift that filled Nelly’s table.

“We were yielding very little, and the crops could not sustain us the whole year,” Nelly remembers. As a mother of seven and a farmer with two decades of experience, the stress of inconsistent yields was all-consuming. A poor harvest not only strained her family financially, but also limited their own meals to just two a day. Their story reflects that of many in their fishing and farming village near a lake in the Karonga district of northern Malawi. Here, heavy rainfall makes conventional farming methods nearly impossible. The entire village is, quite literally, saturated in food insecurity — a reality that leaves families struggling to survive season after season without a dependable source of nourishment.

In 2019, Nelly began participating in Harvesting Prosperity and Resilience, a sustainable agriculture project implemented by Rise Against Hunger in partnership with the Foundation for Community Support Services (FOCUS). The project works with 3,100 smallholder farmers in Malawi’s Karonga and Mzimba districts to strengthen food and nutrition security by improving production methods, nutrition practices and household income.

Just one year later, Nelly was ready to expand the variety of crops on her farm. What land once only produced maize began to flourish with sesame, cowpeas, rice and groundnuts during the rainy season (summer), as well as maize and vegetables during the dry season (winter). Through climate-smart agriculture training, she learned new techniques like manure making, pit planting and mulching, crop rotation and intercropping. Equipped with these tools, Nelly’s farm began to thrive.

After the 2023–2024 growing season, she sold enough produce to purchase an ox cart. Her harvests in 2024-2025 season yielded over 500 pounds of crops, including 22 bags of groundnuts, seven bags of maize, 12 tins of sesame and three bags of rice. With this surplus, she was able to invest in a motorbike, which she now uses to transport African doughnuts (mandasi) that she cooks and sells — creating yet another source of income for her family.

The transformation reaches far beyond her finances. Nelly now has the stability to provide for her husband and children. “I am able to eat different food types, pay school fees for my children and fulfill the visions that I have made with my family,” she beams. “I am now sleeping peacefully without any fears of food or paying school fees for the children.”

Her leadership has also grown. Today, Nelly serves as a leader in the Harvesting Prosperity and Resilience project, teaching other farmers in her district to adopt climate-resilient, labor-saving practices. By sharing her knowledge, she is multiplying her impact — empowering her neighbors to experience the same transformation she has achieved.

Across Nelly’s community, food and economic security are on the rise. Lombani, a government extension officer for the region, explains, “I can see the community is being transformed in the sense that in the area, there is food, income and nutrition security. Development is also happening at the household level.”

Nelly reflects on what it means to invest in holistic programs that address the root causes of hunger: “We are now healthy people. Children are going to school after eating their breakfast, having high yields and different types of crops due to conservation agriculture practices. With the support from the project, we have food, and we can access other food items from the market after selling our produce.”

This is the gift that fills: a future full of stability, strength and hope. It fills tables with food, families with security and communities with the resources to thrive. It’s an investment in futures rooted in resilience and hope.