Veronica Rodriguez Angulo & Aruna Ekohábitat
Veronica Rodriguez Angulo is a Venezuelan architect, visual artist, and mother of two based in Caracas, and the founder of Aruna Ekohábitat Design Laboratory. She has directed her practice toward natural architecture and bamboo — what she calls “vegetable steel” — as a way to link construction technique with art, drawing on agroecology and permaculture in a holistic approach to building. Aruna Ekohábitat provides regenerative design and bio-construction training that turns bamboo into structural solutions and circular products, offering women a practical “know-how” that builds both physical shelter and economic dignity.
With our $500 Giving Joy microgrant, Veronica is launching Bamboo Roots: Post-Disaster, a social technology transfer workshop that will train 15 women within a refugee camp of earthquake-displaced families in low-effort bio-construction and lashing techniques built for rapid emergency shelter assembly. The grant funds a permanent toolkit and raw bamboo, enabling participants to build prototype emergency structures and leave as certified Bamboo Mentors able to repair and replicate shelters across the camp on their own.
The Expected Impact
This grant is expected to directly benefit 15 women through hands-on technical training, with an estimated 15 to 20 family members benefiting from the three prototype emergency shelters built during the workshops. As trained participants begin replicating and repairing structures across their own sectors of the camp, the model is expected to improve housing conditions for 50 or more people within its first six months.
Looking Ahead
Veronica will source the toolkit and raw bamboo and coordinate with camp authorities to identify the first cohort of 15 women, then run two hands-on weekend workshops teaching lashing and modular construction methods tailored for emergency shelter assembly. The group will build and supervise three prototype structures on-site, then shift to assessing their performance and supporting trained women as they begin their own small-scale repairs and replications across the camp.
