Rebecca Gardner was only 19 when she first met the Guaymi women.
As 225 details in a feature from its current issue, the women’s lives are simple, but not easy. They wake before sunrise, start a fire to boil rice for the day and wash clothes in a stream. Their husbands might head off to work, picking coffee cherries or tending to crops. Traveling to the nearest city takes hours, making work inconsistent and hard to find.
They face discrimination, and education is the biggest hurdle of all. The women have elementary-level educations, at best, and struggle to send their own children to school.
“My heart really broke for them. But I didn’t know what my role in helping them could be,” Gardner tells 225. “I didn’t want it to be one of those situations where you think you’re helping, but it’s really more about you feeling good while the community isn’t really better.”
To help empower the women to provide for themselves, three years ago Gardner founded Hands Producing Hope, a fair-trade company offering impoverished communities above fair wages in exchange for goods and services.
The Guaymi women, who had been making jewelry for years, became her first employees. Gardner hired 12 of them, ages 16-60, and collaborated with them on designs to sell in the U.S.
They made necklaces with vibrant Costa Rican seeds and headbands with geometric patterns inspired by Guaymi traditional dresses.
The jewelry is now sold in 20 boutiques around the country, and 24 women create the jewelry. With the money, the women can afford school supplies for their children and buy luxuries such as tilapia and coffee.
Gardner is hoping to expand Hands Producing Hope to a second community, this one on a poor, remote island that sits on a large lake in western Rwanda.
“You can’t just copy and paste a whole part of the world, so I had to make sure this is something that is wanted and needed there, too,” she says. “I never want us to be just these white saviors coming to change the world.”
Read the full feature.
