San Juan Cosala’s 20-year-old Operation Feed program was designed to deliver essential food to the most challenged of the town’s residents. This year it has expanded to help residents learn to grow food and, in time, to make money to ease the family situation.
This spring, Operation Feed volunteers helped six San Juan Cosalá women plant 80 three-foot moringa trees and care for them, as well as plant moringa seeds.
When a summer storm destroyed some the trees, the Moringa Madres were undaunted. They had seedlings large enough to be transplanted as replacements. By late summer, the first crop of leaves, nearly two kilos of tea, was sent to Nashville where it was combined with the efforts of five women’s social enterprises in three countries to create a Tea Survival Kit to be sold in a number of U.S. outlets, including 70 Whole Food stores in the southeastern states.
When Fiona Prine, director of development of the Nashville-based international Shared Trade organization, visited Lake Chapala early this month to meet the Moringa Madres, she explained how the program works.
“This project and all the others started when Nashville’s Rev. Becca Stevens founded the social enterprise, Thistle Farms, to create jobs and to provide fair wages so women could work to break the cycle of poverty. Stevens is never content with doing just a little good. Now she has founded Shared Trade. It’s an international non-profit organization to provide a fair share for women in 14 social enterprises around the world.
“In this case, Shared Trade has the coalition of social enterprises and an initiative of Thistle Farms. Thistle Farms buys the components from the groups around the world. Each woman in each group receives a fair wage for the work she has done and they are all working toward economic freedom. Sales of the Tea Survival Kit will mean that more women are able to break away from poverty, sex trafficking and stigmatizing disease.”
Survival kits
Each Tea Survival Kit starts with a colorful cloth folio crafted by New Visions Sewing Group in Lwala, Kenya. Leather ties and hand-screened tags bearing the company logo are made and attached by The Studios of Thistle Farms in Nashville.
Then small bags of tea from four different groups are added to the kit, along with honey sticks and a spoon. Ajiri tea is grown and harvested in Western Kenya where safe work is available for women while they strive to form a sustainable cycle of community, employment and education. The San Juan Cosala Moringa Madres’ tea leaves are mixed with Hope tea, which comes from a social enterprise in Uganda which partners with tea growers there to provide employment and a chance for better lives for women.
Shared Trade and Thistle Farms have ongoing projects in other places around the world. The nonprofit Stung Treng Women’s Development Center started working in 2001 to break the cycle of poverty, prostitution, and AIDS that so adversely affects so many young Cambodian women. The center is widely respected in Cambodia and beyond for its Mekong Blue silk products which are reviving the traditional Cambodian process of making and designing silks 100 percent by hand. The group has three times earned the UNESCO Seal of Excellence for Handicraft in Southeast Asia. And the silks are marketed through the International Folk Art Market Collection presented by the Dallas Market Center.
A sewing cooperative in Ecuador is named Sibimbe for the river in which the founding seamstresses learned to swim. This social enterprise has formed partnerships with the Escuela Anne Stevens and the non-profit Center for Contemplative Justice, both of which were established by Becca Stevens and are sisters in the Shared Trade alliance. The women in the Ecuadorian cooperative are hand weaving colorful liturgical items including altar clothes and vestment stoles for priests.
Home for women
These and other social enterprises around the world evolved after Stevens, an Episcopal priest, created Magdalene, a home for women. Said Prine: “The house started with just five women, all prostitutes that Stevens persuaded to accept the gift of a home and help. The first step was to give each woman a key to the front door so that each really knew she was home. The only rules of the house were simple and mostly adapted from the community life of the Benedictines.”
Once the women started to be clean and sober, they started waking up to life, and the many hurdles they had to cross before they could earn a decent job and reestablish a good life. Due to the drug use on the streets, some of the women were ill, some had hepatitis; others had lost most of their teeth due to meth use. Some had lengthy rap sheets, none had seen a doctor for years, and they all were in need of nutritional therapy. A team of Nashville doctors, dentists, counselors, and other professionals came to rescue and happily worked with the women, without pay.
Next the women needed meaningful work. When Stevens realized that their various problems would prevent them from working in public venue, she set up a tiny candle-making workshop and then started Thistle Farms to sell the candles and the body and bath products that were the next successful projects. Seeking a name for the new social enterprise group she remembered the weeds, the thistles growing on the streets where the women had walked. But thistles have a deep taproot that can shoot through concrete and survive drought. In spite of their prickly appearance, their soft purple center makes the thistle a gorgeous flower.
Said Stevens: “We don’t make candles because we love making candles. We make as many candles as we can, because it means that women come off the street or out of prison and find new light.” Stevens was invited to the White House where she received recognition as one of the 15 most influential women in the United States.
Lakeside’s Weezie Burgess, a former Nashville resident, is the president of the Operation Feed Advisory Board. During Prine’s visit to Mexico, she invited Burgess to become the tenth member of the Shared Trade Advisory Board.
To learn more about the work of these and the other associate social enterprises functioning under the coalition of Shared Trade, visit ThistleFarms.org, the ThistleFarmsBlog.com, and Becca Stevens.org. To arrange a special gift to this effort that is proving that love heals, email This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..">This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..
For those who plan to be in the Nashville area on October 14, “Roots at the Ryman” is a fall fundraiser featuring the music of Fiona Prine’s husband, John Prine, and Iris Dement, and a presentation by Pulitzer prize-winning photographer Taro Yamasaki.