Emily Hassell has spent her life being a bridge builder. Since her teenage years, she has sought to find ways to balance her efforts to help others practically while elevating social engagement to the arts. Today, she is bringing those two impulses together in her work as the founder and director of Alianza para el Desarrollo Ambiental y Cultural ADAC in Guatemala that has been awarded endorsement by UNESCO.
Emily’s connection with Guatemala and the people there began when she was 18. After earning her nurse’s certificate and saving up money, she packed up a car with her oldest brother who was working in Guatemala with an exporting business. They drove all the way down through Mexico, initially landing at Lake Atitlan, before Emily moved and ultimately settled in the heart of Guatemala City.
“I really had no idea what it would be like other than a kind of National Geographic picture,” she says. “My goals were to learn Spanish, fall in love, and figure out what to do next in my life.”
Emily chose to embed herself in the local community. In 1994, Guatemala was nearing the end of its 36 year civil war, and she found herself—as both a citizen of the country that helped start the civil war and as a part of the post-war generation—connecting with youth from both sides who were coming together to find connection and reconciliation through art.
“It was a very important historical moment,” she says. “You had the signing of The Peace in 1996 and then this flood of avant-garde creativity burst outside the usual context of galleries, pouring onto the street into the public realm. This post-war generation gained an acclaim that is still spoken about to this day, with numerous Guatemalan artists from that time who are in major collections like the Tate and the Guggenheim.”
This formative experienced launched the beginnings of what would become a lifelong career focused on the arts and social activism, exhibiting her art in galleries and museums, pioneering, and nurturing the founding and co-founding of social and cultural initiatives. Emily achieved the three goals that she had when she set out to Guatemala. She learned the language, and also fell in love with a bohemian Guatemalan musician, painter, and poet with whom she started a family.
While Emily was passionate about her work in Guatemala, the country was still healing from decades of war which had left a lingering culture of violence. She decided in 2006 to move back to the Hudson Valley with her four young children, to give them what she calls “the incredible gift that my parents gave me to be able to grow up where I did [at Hawthorne Valley].” But after living in Columbia County for ten years, during which she co-founded both the Experimental Artists Collective and Camphill Ghent, while her children all attended HVS. In 2016 Emily felt it was time to move back to Guatemala so that her kids could reconnect with their roots. This time, they settled in Antigua where she anticipated picking up her career in the arts.
Antigua was a huge tourist destination, but when Emily began to reconnect with the artist community, she found that there wasn’t any infrastructure to support artists, with a major lack and deficiency of representation for the arts and culture. Emily recognized that she could draw upon her years of experience as an artist and activist to help the local community come together for conversations around developing the needed infrastructure. While she dedicated her time to create the first unified public arts and culture sector for the city, she also had to address the need for an organization with the capacity to channel and direct funding to under-represented initiatives and groups in order to finance public arts initiatives and socially engaged projects. Founding her own 501c3 nonprofit in 2017, Emily works in conjunction with local leaders, associations, organizations, government officials, embassies, artists, institutions, and cultural and conservation commissions. Impulsing the development of national initiatives and projects creating social and cultural change, she has had the endorsement of UNESCO Guatemala since 2018.
Currently, Emily is using the same methodology she developed in Antigua to work with a rural community in the Buffer Zone between the Mayan Biosphere and Lake Peten Itza near the global destination of Tikal. The challenges there look very different from those in the city. As is common in many touristic destinations, ground level issues remain hidden to visitors with the local population being edged out of sight. Many of the people live in extreme poverty with one or more family members migrating to the US for years at a time to work and send money home. While in Antigua, Emily focused on building up arts and culture, here she focuses on supporting the growth of a local economy that is nature based, in alignment with the regional focus on sustainability, conservation, and ecology.
“They desperately need more jobs here, and they also have an abundance of discarded materials that they aren’t taking advantage of, from the clay soil that could be used in bioconstruction or to start microbusinesses,” she says. “They check a lot of boxes for support—like opportunities for sustainable agriculture, green solutions, environmental conservation, serving marginalized women and children—but they arn’t organized and have no structure to be able to receive support, so that’s the challenge I’m hoping to help them bridge.”
In all her work, Emily sees herself in a supportive role to the Guatemalan people, bringing groups together and sharing her skills and knowledge in a way that will make her redundant. Galvanizing the internal growth of the country’s wealth beginning at the local community level, she facilitates the initial design and implementation of projects and initiatives that are informed by the community, setting them up to be community-driven, self-guided, self-owned, and self-led.
“The most important aspect is putting Guatemalans at the center of my work as the protagonists, encouraging and empowering them to take ownership of ideas and start talking to each other!” she says. “Much of what I do is simply sitting down and having conversations and listening to help them talk about proposals and how to make things work more efficiently. Although I serve as a consultant throughout the process, how they take it up, what the proposals look like, how they adapt them to fit, in the end really depends on them.” You can learn more about the Alianza para el Desarrollo Ambiental y Cultural here. If you’d like to support efforts for the start-up of their village’s first Women-led Cooperative production workshop, Arts & Ecology Educational Community Center for youth and children click here.
