Celebrating Wins! Even When They’re Small Potatoes! – (Read Time: 2 min.)
Fashion as a Force for Good sometimes looks like small potatoes.
Scrappy Determination
We love seeing our Artisan partners use their scrappy determination to think “big picture” and create their own long-term solutions to challenges their families are facing.
But even the smallest purchase makes a lasting impact that helps families thrive!
Our Artisan partners in Uganda decided to collectively use the money they received for their handcrafted Fringe Batwa Ornaments to buy Irish potatoes.
We pay our Artisan partners their full asking price – immediately upon request. This provides them with immediate compensation for their time, supply money, and production expenses… and empowers them to feed their families NOW.
Many Artisan communities work together and invest their income to make bulk purchases that will benefit their entire local community – long term. These types of investments provide both immediate and future solutions to the challenges they’re facing in their individual countries.
Uganda’s Need for Sustainable Solutions for Hunger
Forced from their beloved rainforest homeland, the Batwa people became conservation refugees. Extreme discrimination and violence often prevent them from earning income. Batwa women and children are not allowed to attend schools or receive medical care in local hospitals. They are often treated like animals by their fellow countrymen. As a result, many of the Batwa people have died from starvation, sickness, and violence.
How are Potatoes Helping?
For generations, the Batwa women have woven traditional nesting and storage baskets from the native grasses of Africa. They stored their families’ food, seeds, and spices in these baskets. Now, they’re weaving the traditional baskets of their ancestors to earn income to feed their families.
Using their income collectively to purchase a huge pile of Irish potatoes can potentially help them feed their families for generations. While potatoes don’t provide complete nutrition, they can sustain a family living in extreme poverty from starvation almost indefinitely.
A single potato can be cut up and replanted to create multiple plants for continued future potato harvests.
Each harvest, potatoes can provide hot satisfying meals for hungry families and single potatoes can be cut up and planted to produce multiple future harvests. That’s a WIN-WIN! Food today… AND food tomorrow!
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