Empowered Women International Event

Empowered Women International Event

A couple weeks ago Ansell and I attended a special shopping event at One Thousand Villages that was hosting Empowered Women International.

One Thousand Villages is a fantastic store that specializes in Fair Trade goods. All the items sold in the store are Fair Trade and really unique.

At the event, One Thousand Villages donated 20% of all proceeds sold that evening to Empowered Women International. I had been wanting to get some Christmas presents there anyway and liked being able to ensure a chunk of the profits went to my old internship non-profit EWI.

It was also great because I got to see Marga, the founder, there and finally introduce her to Ansell.

All in all we had a great time shopping and got our Christmas stuff done early!

Afterwards we went to a Bluegrass bar and listened to some live music.

Empowered Women International

Since June I have been interning part-time at Empowered Women International, a local non-profit, as the Non-Profit Management Intern.

In a nutshell EWI focuses on providing immigrant, refugee, and low-income women who have basic artisan business ideas, with a 4-month intensive business and entrepreneurship course to move their idea into reality.

We then follow with additional mentor support and resources to make our entrepreneurs artisan business a success.

This falls in line with a lot of my beliefs about where non-profit work should be heading. I believe traditional aid is failing. Millions of dollars has been donated in poverty relief but the poverty issue is still just as bad.

Our dollars should be going instead to fund education, vocational training, and microfinance so people can create or expand on their own businesses. Creating a sustainable increase in income for disadvantaged people is the only way to have a permanent solution to the poverty problem.

This is why I support EWI so much. It helps to create economic, and career opportunities for low-income, immigrant and refugee women and raise awareness and increase appreciation for the cultural contributions that immigrant and refugee women make to our country.

I don’t want this post to run to long so I will close now.

Please read more about EWI at their website www.ewint.org and check out their FaceBook!