Karen Lee of EcoKaren and I have partnered on a new social enterprise, Herban Crafts, that will offer a job and social skills training program to unemployed women in transitional housing in the DC and NY areas. To support our programming, Herban Crafts will sell DIY kits for various types of earth-friendly products. The kits will be manufactured, in part, by the trainees as part of their job skills training.
The first set of kits will teach people how to make their own organic bath and body products, and we will be adding additional types of kits in the future. We believe teaching people how to make their own products is empowering, and we also see it as an opportunity to teach people about the importance and joys of working with organic, fair trade, recycled and repurposed materials.
Our mission is multi-fold: to promote self-sufficiency while also supporting the health and wellbeing of people and the planet; and to help address the problem of unemployment, a contributing factor to homelessness, by offering a hands-on job and social skills training program for unemployed women living in transitional housing.
You can find more information about the company and our mission on our
IndieGoGo campaign page where you can also pledge to help fund our initial production of kits. Suggested donations start at just $5.00, and there are lots of great rewards for our sponsors! And if this is something that you believe in as much as we do, please help spread the word to your friends on social media and via e-mail. And we hope you will follow us on
Facebook,
Twitter, and
Pinterest for updates!
For an idea of our overall mission and plan, you can view our presentation from the 2012 Global Health and Innovation Conference held at Yale University on April 22, 2012.
herban lifestyle 
Once again, congratulations Mary and Karen!! This is an extraordinary and inspiring project! I will definitely be supporting and following!
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Thank you for your kind words and support, Laurie. It’s good to be part of a network of people like you who want to help make the world a better place through crating!
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“Yarns for a better world” and “Crafting a better world” sound awesome!
Thank you for your support and following us! We are really blessed to have such a caring community!
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All the best for this exciting venture!
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Thank you very much!
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You ladies are awesome – I can feel the love!!! I wish you the best and I sense that it wil be a wonderful enterprise on many levels.
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Thank you so much, Theresa! Once we’re established, I’d love to talk to you about the idea of offering a beading kit… 🙂
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This is so incredibly cool! How can I help? Those kits look like something I would buy for my neices for the birthdays. We have two transitional housing centers here that I work with. Would it be possible to do an afternoon there? What would be the cost? email if you have any interest.
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Thanks so much, Tammy! It would be great if you could spread the word! The dream is to implement it in cities across the country, so I would love to be able to bring it to your area. I will email you with details about the program. Thank you so much for your support!
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What a wonderfully inspired and generous idea!
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Thank you very much for your kind words, Heather!
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