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Who We Are
Taller Salud is a historic Puerto Rican, feminist, anti-racist, community-based nonprofit organization. For nearly five decades, we have worked to advance the health and well-being of women and their communities, championing gender justice, violence prevention, and community leadership, advocacy, organizing, and economic security across Puerto Rico.
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OUR PURPOSE
Mission & Vision
Mission
Elevating women’s leadership to transform Puerto Rico, while prioritizing the health and well-being of our communities as a cornerstone of collective development.
Vision
Organized communities exercising their right to comprehensive health and a dignified life, advancing collective action that ensures the well-being, full development, and sustainable future of our people.
OUR DEFINITION
Health is...
For us, health is a non-negotiable human right. We understand health as a state of balance that each person establishes between themselves and their environment. Health also means the right to live free from violence and the opportunity for communities to thrive and achieve sustainable development. We recognize the importance of a holistic approach to health that encompasses physical, emotional, and spiritual well-being. We advocate for environmental health and promote community health. We know that when women thrive, their communities grow stronger. That is why we believe that the health of a people begins with the health of its women.
OUR VALUES
What Defines US
At Taller Salud, we embrace a holistic understanding of well-being. The following values guide our work and shape our vision for Puerto Rico, grounded in the belief that they are essential to the well-being, growth, and flourishing of our communities.
Autonomy
We recognize each person’s fundamental right to make informed decisions about their body, their life, and their well-being.
Participation
We believe everyone has the right to participate in the decisions and processes that affect their lives. We build organized community participation to strengthen collective power and advance better public policies.
Equity
We believe everyone should have equal opportunities and the full protection of their human rights. We center and honor Afro-descendant communities and people of all gender-diverse identities. We embrace and defend diversity.
We are committed to community economic development through a sustainable lens, in harmony with the conservation and protection of our natural resources.
Sustainability
Mutual Support
We uphold reciprocity, mutual aid, and collaboration among individuals and groups for the benefit of all. We build through solidarity.
We are an organization unaffiliated with religious institutions. We uphold secularism and the separation of Church and Sate.
Secularism
45+ Years Transforming Lives and Communities
Our History
Taller Salud’s history has been shaped by our commitment to advancing and educating communities about women’s rights, challenging systemic and community violence, working to end violence against women, strengthening community organizing, and engaging in policy advocacy to ensure lives of dignity, wholeness, well-being, and joy.
45+
Years of service and community support
1979
Taller Salud is Born
A group of women comes together in Río Piedras, San Juan, following a decade of experimentation on women’s bodies in Puerto Rico. The founders of the Taller Salud collective organize to provide and strengthen reproductive health education across the archipelago.
The 80s
10 years of education and activism
A decade of presence and action in countless efforts to advance women’s rights, both in Puerto Rico and beyond, including active participation in the creation and passage of the groundbreaking and historic Law 54, which addresses violence against women in Puerto Rico.
Taller Salud’s response following Hurricane Hugo also forged lasting relationships with communities in Loíza, laying the foundation for what would eventually become the organization’s home.
The 90s
This decade was marked by numerous international engagements and opportunities for members of the Taller Salud collective to represent the organization on the global stage. These efforts continued our work to bring feminist voices from the Puerto Rican archipelago into global conversations on issues affecting women’s health and well-being.
The organization also experienced the loss of one of its key members, Margaret Wochinger, to breast cancer. In response, Taller Salud recognized the importance of strengthening health education and support for women, building partnerships with allied organizations, and expanding the health issues we addressed to include breast cancer and HIV among women.
The 2000
A New Home for Taller Salud
After years of community organizing and support in Loíza following Hurricane Hugo in the late 1980s, Taller Salud formally establishes its headquarters in this municipality.
Puerto Rico enters a new century marked by collective organizing for peace in Vieques, early signs of a government fiscal crisis, and other events that broaden the horizons for Taller Salud’s service provision.
2011-2012
Acuerdo de Paz (Peace Agreement)
Women in Loíza identify violence reduction as a priority for public and community health. In 2011, Taller Salud launches its signature program in the communities of Loíza.
2017-2022
Community Responses Across Puerto Rico
The arrival of hurricanes, earthquakes, and a pandemic shaped Taller Salud’s work, as we organized community-led responses across the Puerto Rican archipelago and trained leaders to promote community health.
2023-2025
Resilience Centers Inauguration
Taller Salud expands its services to communities in southern and southwestern Puerto Rico with the inauguration of Resilience Centers in Salinas and San Germán.
10K+
Women in the Community Health Promoters Network
65%
Sustained reduction in community violence in Loíza
3
Resilient Centers
Who We Are
Our Team
Taller Salud’s team is deeply committed to advancing the health and well-being of our people and communities across Puerto Rico.
Who We Are
Team and Board of Directors
Board of Directors
Tania Rosario Méndez
Tania is a community organizer, public health professional, and human rights advocate, born and raised in Puerto Rico. She holds a Master of Public Health from the University of Puerto Rico and brings more than 18 years of experience in the nonprofit sector.
Since 2016, she has led the work of Taller Salud, a historic feminist organization. Tania’s vision is to build a Puerto Rico where health, peace, development, and well-being are guaranteed as social rights for all. She serves on the boards of the Puerto Rico Gender Equity Observatory and the Puerto Rican organization Resilient Socioecological Actions (HASER), as well as the governing council of the Latin American and Caribbean Women’s Health Network (RSMLAC). She is also a member of the Advisory Committee of the Latin American Consortium Against Unsafe Abortion (CLACAI), the Resource Mobilization Collective for Environmental Justice of the Kataly Foundation, and the strategy team of the Organizing Resilience coalition.
Tania is also a professor in the Master’s Program in Cultural Management within the University of Puerto Rico’s Interdisciplinary Studies Program. She is a theater director and educator, cultural organizer, full-spectrum doula, and childbirth educator.
Above all, she is a proud mother: her son is a talented college student, and her daughter is a brilliant high school student. She is fiercely and joyfully grateful to be alive.
Taller Salud’s Women Leaders
Meet the organization's senior leadership
Lourdes Inoa Monegro
Director.
Yamara Rodríguez Burgos
Director of Operations
Angela Cruz Félix
Women & Health Director
Scherezada Fuentes Mangual
Community Outreach Director
In the Company of
Board of Directors
Ana María Vidal Cerra
President
Liza Fuentes
Vicepresident
Agnes Salgado
Treasurer
Rosanna Torres Pizarro
Secretary
Agustina Luvis Núñez
Board Member
Gisella Rivera Figueroa
Board Member
Renata Beca Barragán
Board Member
Erika Fontánez Torres
Board Member
Eyra Agüero Joubert
Board Member
Marisol Lebrón
Board Member
María Suárez Santos
Board Member
Cristina Ortiz Gómez
Board Member
What Guides Us
Political Practice
All of Taller Salud’s work is grounded in the following approaches and methodologies.
Feminist Practice
01
Feminist Stance: We are a feminist organization and apply gender-responsive approaches across all of our work. We work toward equity as a pathway to collectively building a more just, caring, and liberated society. We understand reality through the lens of the power relations produced and reproduced by gender inequality. We seek to transform these relationships through diverse strategies that promote equity, justice, participation, and solidarity.
Community Feminism: We align ourselves politically with the values, practices, and principles of community feminism. We believe that life is cared for and sustained within community. We affirm our right to defend our bodies and our lands against all forms of exploitation, dispossession, and violence.
Anti-Racist Practice
02
Anti-Racist Stance: We promote public policies and cultural norms that transform power dynamics and inequitable relationships rooted in the racialization of people. We address both implicit and explicit biases embedded in institutional policies and cultural practices, while developing tools for anti-racist education and action. We center the knowledge and lived experiences of Black and Afro-descendant people in Puerto Rico.
Anti-Racist Practice: We work to recognize and dismantle current and historical inequalities and forms of discrimination that have created racist barriers, biases, and stereotypes. Our work focuses on identifying, challenging, and confronting racism in all its forms while advancing racial equity and justice through education, awareness, and community action.
03
Public Health Approach
Health as a Human Right: We firmly believe that everyone has the right to comprehensive health and to a life free from violence. We champion public health approaches centered on people and communities and grounded in the right to live with dignity. We recognize the right to health for all and promote healthy, violence-free environments. We work to improve the quality of life in our communities by addressing economic, cultural, and environmental factors as social determinants of health.
Holistic Health: Through a community-based, culturally responsive, and trauma-informed practice, we understand holistic health as a state of balance among physical, emotional, mental, spiritual, and social factors that enables people to thrive. We center the social determinants of health throughout our work to eliminate health inequities.
Community Health Promotion: We work through an intersectional, human rights-based approach and a community-led model of holistic health education developed by and for women. Our approach is grounded in processes of reflection, action, and empowerment around health, and informed by community-based feminist education and critical gender theory. Community health promotion challenges the commodification of health at the expense of people’s well-being and advocates for a universal, integrated, human-centered, and equitable health system for Puerto Rico.
Justice and Peace Approach
04
Violence Prevention and Intervention: We prioritize strengthening communities and ensuring access to services centered on people’s dignity and safety. We work to transform the conditions that perpetuate violence, and to create safe spaces. We recognize the interplay of historical, social, and cultural factors and promote sustainable solutions rooted in and responsive to the quality of life of communities.
05
Community Resilience
We take a multidisciplinary and cross-cutting approach that deepens critical thinking and creates pathways toward more just alternatives. We build bridges across generations to foster the exchange of knowledge and strengthen the social fabric essential to a just and inclusive future. We work intentionally and boldly to challenge all forms of oppression and violence. We encourage critical reflection on the use and abuse of power and create spaces for participation and social change rooted in justice.