Courtesy of Charles Steinberg
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BeadforLife not only makes jewelry out of a recycled material, nor does it stop at teaching business skills to women in Uganda in the process—it's also striving to be a carbon-neutral operation.
It's essentially a fair-trade jewelry organization—items made by people who are guaranteed fair market price—but instead of women being considered employees, they enter an 18-month program and are trained to make beads while also learning entrepreneurial and business skills.
The goal is not to have all women making jewelry as a form of long-term employment, but to motivate and enable them to start a business of their own choosing. The jewelry they make in their time as members is sold in the U.S. and around the world, and they earn money from each piece they make—about $1 from a bracelet that sells for $5, for example—that then goes into a savings account. In a part of the world where holding a bank account is not necessarily common, especially for women, this is a big part of the learning process, and a big step forward.
The beads are made from almost any kind of used, stiff paper—old cardboard, cereal boxes, posters, etc.—that they find as trash or collect from a local printing business. Women learn to turn this into a resource and roll it into paper beads and make jewelry out of it.
Image courtesy of Charles Steinberg
Jewelry is then shipped (in recycled boxes) to the U.S., where it is sold online (and it's beautiful stuff—take a look!), through retailers, and through bead parties, which the organization has found to be one of the most exciting tools for outreach as much as sales. Anyone who's interested can organize a bead party—get some friends together and BFL will mail out a 'kit' with information about the organization, music to listen to, African recipes to cook up and serve at the event, and of course, jewelry to sell.
BeadforLife is based in Boulder, so I was able to meet Torkin Wakefield, one of the cofounders, and Nicole Givan, the chair of the environmental committee. Torkin said these parties are where so much of their success has come from: one woman organizes a party and one of the guests will like it so much that she goes and organizes her own event—with other friends, at her church, etc.
Like many fair trade communities, the impact of this work in Uganda far transcends the beads: 98 percent of the children of women members are in school, malaria is down and HIV/AIDS testing is up, as is family planning. And a project known as Friendship Village—which started when BFL first learned that the greatest wish for most members was to have their own house—now has 132 homes where about 1,000 people live with wells, gardens, and playgrounds.
Nicole told me about the organization's efforts to maintain environmentally sound practices. In Uganda, the environmental committee is newer and they are currently studying how to integrate environmental education into the program. As of now, they have composting on site and send their plastics to a recycling center in Kampala.
Here in Boulder, June was Walk & Bike Month, and the organization brought the number of uses of alternative transportation to 115 from 65 last year. They recently expanded into a new space in a small office building—they outgrew the old one and now have a beautiful, expansive office complete with a bead shop—but the building didn't have composting services until BeadforLife for moved in. Now you walk into the bathroom and all the paper towels are directed into a compost bin. They reuse and recycle the plastic bags that the jewelry is shipped in, and take other measures to keep waste to a minimum.
As Torkin said, without addressing climate change, poverty eradication almost means nothing. We have to change our ways.
More on fair trade and development in Uganda
Meet Robyn Nietert of the Women's Microfinance Initiative: Building Businesses, and Lives, One Loan At a Time (Interview)
GIrl Power: Support Female Artisans with these Fair Trade Shops
Ugandan Coffee Farmers Worried About Climate Change
Find Fair Trade Producers on Google Earth
