i'm thrilled to be talking today to a very exciting woman young woman ellen ito and she's here to tell us all about seeds to sow which is an organization that does wonderful things emancipate young girls and women in africa so without further ado i'd like to introduce bill thank you very much jenny i'm so excited to be here i love your earrings actually aided by a pair yes you can these were actually made by women in our program figured as a way to pay for school  service so i've always been involved with at risk youth with them women and girls and their their ability to become empowered has always been a passion of mine whether it be here or overseas i always knew that eventually i would be involved with a nonprofit that helped to empower them and so i always figured that that would happen after i sold my business and i was always there so i ran to a human resources firm in my day job and b he is a financial planner and we were just talking about long term plans and what are you going to do with your business and then he said what would you regret if you got hit by a box and i said aside from seeing my kids grow up i really regret not starting my nonprofit and then he said what's going to be and he said well tell me about that and i said i always wanted to do something with women and girls and skills training and and he said well why don't you just do it and i was like very kid i'm running a business i have kids how am i going to do that and it just kept eating at me and eating at me and i you know i thought you know what maybe i can do this but how did you put this idea together so the idea came about because i always knew that for women who are  undereducated sometimes what it took was was a skill an actual practical skill and my mother and my aunt and my grandmothers always so they made our clothes they made crafts and and so this idea for sewing came in to be and i talked to my mother and my aunt about this who who are co founders of the nonprofit and we thought this is something that a woman can do with electricity or without it some but was a good you were interested removing africa or were you interested in women in general you were interested in women in general because i don't know if sewing would really make a woman threaten that much wealthier actually we explored this so the idea for so the idea for the bags came about as a first product because it's a very simple product right it's a square bag straight seems very aware that you're getting into this are hunter and you know how did you go from what are you going to do if you get hit by a bus you know you have to talking to your your mom and your  when my husband married into the family he's jewish he they weren't big christmas people or not but we're you know we're christian and so we celebrate christmas he'd come to our house we lived in colorado at the time and when it came to christmas time he would take all of the pillow cases in the house and shove our presents into them and it wasn't that he was lazy it was that he wanted to not waste paper and i wanted to save the trees so my mom and my auntie my grandma started making these as a all right so so so as we're thinking about what still could we teach a woman you know i have this meeting with george my friend and i'm thinking what can we do i talk to my mom and my aunt i'm thinking so it would be a great thing to teach women they so their own clothes they can make money from it and we thought but what can we do that can help them make money right away and we kind of came to this idea of what if they made the gift that raising of the population of africa yet not yet just talking about women and you were talking  knew so you knew it was going to america we knew it was not going to be america's because a lot of the sewing was done overseas anyway ok and i had enough background in canada international international labor just from my h r background  sort of under educated at under educated population so we actually formed the nonprofit with the idea of sewing in mind and then so we form the business applied for four or five on one up you don't worry if you really knew would you just start of the corporation yeah and then you thought ok well you really didn't know who you were directed towards we didn't know which population just knows about sewing we know is that so i love it but i think that's interesting because i think people think they have to have the whole thing figure d out where they're going to keep going well it's good to have an idea of where you're going right what you didn't you just knew stone yeah ok and it wasn't a huge capital investment right so it wasn't like we were risk you know not what i was risking was my time and the time of my friends of my mom and my aunt and everybody else i was talking to so then what happened so then as i was out talking with people i met a woman by the name of kenya anti a who is from kenya she was the first girl who was actually able to leave her village  and get a college education here in the states college i met her at the aspen environmental institute she was talking about health educating girls improves the lives of the community that they're in  rates go down malnutrition goes down the community overall is better off and so i went up to her after her panel discussion and i said hi i'm ellen and i have this idea for a nonprofit  and it involves sewing and here is the concept we teach or women how to sew we have a first product we expect that will be able to sell these bags and that will provide immediate income goes up through the ok yet we knew what we knew what we would do you  met we did a fundraiser for her school in her dormitory where we actually locally in hopewell we had a number of seamstresses come together bring donated fabric we had to make a bunch of bags so we could test the market for them so that when we did the fundraiser we could generate funds to actually then have a trainer sit down and work with her village in kenya so we she she is a story in and of herself that she's just overcome but just to keep the sequence yes so you're making the bag up in hopewell yet as a as a knowing that we were doing a fundraiser for her and that we were going to launch in well that's what i'm thinking so i think i've got enough about how it started i guess it's been launched now i really want to know describe to us who are the girls like how did it start from the beginning i'm always interested in having seed yes yes exactly so how did this with these girls started  it's primary school and then they go to secondary school because it is a true primary would be our kindergarten if it's really kindergarten until eighth grade is primary and no girls generally make it beyond primary yet very right i mean it where that's not an overstatement not at all so really we're talking about like thirteen year old girls come out of eighth grade and are expected to marry that's right and that's what this girl did yeah so what actually happens is before they're married they're cut so they have a they need to do to be accepted and that is changing now it's changing now because of kenya because of some of the work that we're doing because of the work that others are doing and i just love the way that i mean i know that we can go off and all this but it is what happens when you start with something simple again knowing and now we're talking about you know female mutilation and you have there's so many things that happen now it's a little it's a seed it's a see there's a back to that so you guys are working with this twenty year old mom who's got four girls young and choose her daughter go to the school they go to your lady you have met you and and so what happened to the trainer come in and teach them and how do i get over so basically they are the we weren't there for the first you know when they were trialing the bags they wanted to see how hard this would be so actually to kenya had a woman who was who just learned to sew and was doing some of the uniforms who started as our first trainer and so she learned to sew the bags and we again continued to test them in the market here and then when we went out there that summer that next summer we brought in our first class of women and there were there were essentially three women who were so in with us at that time three moms all with kids as we've been sewing the products that then they were going to sell in america correct but don't you new sewing machine yes that cost less so it does so they use the travel machines so we're there they're about two hundred seventy five dollars so we purchased two of them and we had a donation for one of the one of the women was using one of the trainers was using a machine that was there which was really helpful so we were able to to understand we learned so much during that first year just so much because what i find with people to interview who go to different countries is they talk about in they're always telling me how big the community of people who work for them are part of the people who live in the neighborhood live in that shire in this case tribes here in africa and you know we don't know we don't know what yeah you know because i'm just wondering about that you talked about in your website about how men are the sowers right yes so sewing is typically a man's profession and i don't know that it's a guild profession there are women who so but it's it's  more common to have men who so and so for women who are not educated in these areas are treated very much like proper property they don't own land they don't control resources they they practice polygamy here so if you are wife number two or three you really low on the totem pole as it relates to having any sort of influence within your family and also there's a whole thing i think we'll get into a little bit later but after someone starts to be empowered  i mean there's a big article in the times about you know the girls that went off to work and so that the tribesmen not to be negative about men but the tribesmen might find that threatening right imo prize that sewing machines were stalls so it's really interesting because we every year we go back and we'll interview some of the men and some of the dads and you know well ask them things like for the girls who are able to go to school there are programs will say you know how do you feel about your daughter becoming educate dated and not getting married and they'll make comments like oh we think it's great because in the get go off and get a good job they can get married and then come back and take care of me so it's ok it is true that the value of an educated woman is higher than the value of a of a girl who  not as long as they're not having to pay for it again this is subsistence farming area very poor so being able to pay for their children to go to school is it's difficult so let's go back to what those seats for so are doing you guys are not only having these girls learned to sew but then they create a product that gets sold here and then you take that money would you could i mean a bag like any of these things is beautiful things that ellen has brought here could go for i mean i'm sure you could get twenty dollars for this ten thousand villages right yeah maybe we should raise our prices to consider that but i'm just saying ten dollars here goes back flies back to kenya that ten dollars gives them what oh gosh a lot right now so you consider one semester of high school that they have to pay for can range anywhere from about sixty bucks to three hundred dollars depending on where they go one year for one for one semester it's a four month term that's expensive so for them where you know on average make five dollars a week you know what they actually end up getting is about eight dollars and fifty cents you know there's transit costs there's raw materials that we take in life it's definitely meaningful but that's the whole the whole focus of your group is that they they sell the products and then tell more don't they learn  there's an organization called global connection that's ten yes and that focuses on bringing together non profits and other initiatives to improve the lives of individuals in kenya and so we have collaborated with him on a number mean the concept of given a gift bag right so in an impoverished community given a gift is not a common thing and the idea of spending money to them to buy gift wrap is foreign so really working with them to understand the concept of quality and cleanliness is something that we learned early on but they do come to the workshop which is to our shops where we teach the materials you know that the ribbons the thread where they can learn these things but beyond that at the shop they also think about things like you know making money what do we do with this and so we will help them open a bank account will help them think through the long term what do they want to do with money can buy some milk and now that they're earning income they're is able to save and so what that means the concept of thinking through longer term goals is a concept that they're not necessarily used to well i'm not to say that i mean these other organizations that i talked to in trenton one of the concepts is so heart is what is a future yes if you have started you know if you're under sort of community ready surviving on a daily basis you really don't ever think about your future yeah and so it's really important concept to say you know i'm a worthy person and i'm a girl who become a woman i will learn how to sew i will become a business woman i will make money oh educate myself go back to my community then i could don't they teach their their their children how to learn us so so they will so what they've done by virtue of learning a new skill their confidences raise they know they can do other things that passes on you know not only are they then paying for their school fees but they're able to feed their families and i love that you're holding the money you know with me you're holding the money and saying when you're ready let us know your plan yeah not that every would take the money but i would be nervous also that for the beating and the money go to we you know that is specifically geared towards education and so the only place for school that with the the bags that money gets paid to the women is income die with what they wish to do with they need to and we encourage them then to save a certain amount as they're thinking about their future and like some of the things we're working on now that were you know three years into this is helping our women think through we had some requests for special orders and so we've been helping them go out price local fabric price local materials and come up with a pricing structure that works for them with their time and their effort was all the fabric there's been a lot of requests for local food like kenyan fabric and that's our goal is we want them to to have the skills we want to teach them to fish maybe we want them to have the skills to be able to build up a barrier to the purchasing to yes if they could learn how to go program she came from a village that was further away from where we're located and her husband was not working he was drinking he was beating when the kids she heard about the program from her mother she came into the program initially and li so anyway so beatrice started learning to sew her bags were beautiful she really committed was practicing she's probably our top bad person just in terms of quality and she's working with our other women and mentoring them but a year later we come back and she says i want you to videotape me and she's dressed in her messiah outfit with the down and she tells us that she's put money down on land and this is unheard of and they're just not a lot of women landowners but she was so proud and she's confident she's looking at us and smiling and openness so we asked her we said so is your husband going to come live with you will he be respectful and she said oh yes he's very proud you knows now that if he needs anything he can call me and she said speak to go because i know a lot of i mean them i've heard this transformation i heard in afghanistan on the women were selling on the streets and the men still  to factories i mean there's there's a transformation when the woman starts to be a provider and it's actually a good thing yeah they come respected well do that the thing is that they have the balance of shout power shifts a little bit and they can call shots a little bit more over how they manage their resources there's a world health organization statistic that says when a woman or girl earns income in the developing well they return more than ninety four percent to their family or community compared to less than thirty five percent for male who are why you would have them doing with so you know we've talked about this a lot so it least in the communities that we work in they drink they gamble a lot of this has to do with the way you know in these cultures a lot of them are nomadic culture so they're not used to their culture is not about being sedentary and working a job and so on the culture it's a cultural shift but yet it's  the men are not particularly productive compared to women who feed their kids you know work really hard and their whole bunch of theories about why that is but we see that firsthand so will you use this woman  she just graduated college because in our program she was able to pay for fees really are talking with her and one other student about doing some program cord nation on the ground in kenya and working with with their i don't want to say peers but with others in their community is really important because in a society where there is not a lot to go around sound people tend to be very you know the they  they want to hold what they have you know i'm going to ask you to speak to the camera ask for what you want because really have thirty seconds that's it you know so what we really would like that we are right now focused very heavily on building word on social media we could always use support on the business side of the house your own here volunteers are wonderful these are all volunteer type roles of volunteers to help with some of our ongoing finishing work here people who want to come with us and visit five a one c three this is the engine of our sewing program right now so if you have hoards of fabric in your in your garage or your basement in your recall give us a call now we're going to play a little clip at the end of the show so i'm going to close