Sausalito – Viña del Mar
Program Drives Online Innovation

The cornerstone of the Sausalito – Viña del Mar program is a group called AGEP — Asociación Gremial de Empresarias y Profesionales, or Union of Women Business Owners and Professionals. This group of approximately 50 women supports and does business with each other in the Viña del Mar/Valparaiso region. Since 2011, the Sausalito VDM Ops Council has mentored AGEP members. Our programs empower them through leadership workshops and training from entrepreneurs here in the Bay Area.

This year, the women of AGEP exceeded our wildest dreams. As Chile locked down due to Covid, they quickly designed Vitrina Circular, an online market platform to connect micro-businesses and sell their products safely online. The women developed the platform with funding from Chile’s Small Business Administration SERCOTEC. By November, they launched and presented the platform to the Sausalito VDM Ops Council. We on the Ops Council are thrilled with the AGEP women’s initiative and ingenuity.

Since we weren’t able to travel to Chile this year, we initiated a series of zoom calls between our two groups, both to continue our mentorship as well as to connect personally. We hosted a very successful online marketplace training in one zoom, and in another we connected the women with website marketing experts to help them grow Vitrina Circular.

In one very special zoom call we held a “book club” discussion of Isabel Allende’s recent novel, A Long Petal of the Sea. In her book, Chilean author and longtime Marin County resident Allende recounts the true story of Pablo Neruda helping over two thousand refugees of the Spanish War reach Chile. Four AGEP members have relatives who arrived in Chile as Spanish War refugees, and they shared touching firsthand stories of their experiences.