"Sewing has the power to change a person's story."
Mozambican Women
and one of the demographics that suffers the most is widows and single mothers.
35% of Mozambican women are single mothers
90% of girls/women never even start high school
88% of women cannot find jobs with a living wage
63% of female-headed households are below the poverty line
“If we reduce humans to being simply physical, our poverty-alleviation efforts will tend to focus on material solutions. But if we remember that humans are spiritual, social, psychological, and physical beings, our poverty-alleviation efforts will be more holistic in their design and execution.”
Holistic Poverty needs Holistic Solutions
Extreme poverty affects every aspect of a person's life.
We seek to provide a holistic solution that goes
above and beyond generating income and heals the entire person.
Physical Poverty
Lacking enough money to survive, frequently go without food, inadequate shelter, and children cannot attend school.
Skills Training
After learning how to sew, the women can start their own businesses and rise out of physical poverty.
Emotional Poverty
Lacking hope that life can improve, stuck in a poverty mentality that holds them prisoners to their fate.
Hope
With a newfound way to support their families with dignity, they rise out of mental and emotional poverty.
Social Poverty
Lacking any close friendships, rejected and outcast, unwanted, verbally abused, feeling unloved.
Community
We create an intentional sisterhood among participants that helps them rise out of social poverty.
Spiritual Poverty
Lacking a relationship with God, even those who go to church feel that God has abandoned them and does not love them.
Discipleship
We teach each lady how to read the Bible, pray, and know God personally to rise out of spiritual poverty.
Meet Luisa
Luisa is a widow who used to struggle to survive; she regularly begged for handouts, her ramshackle hut would flood with every rain, and she and her adopted daughter lived on rotten vegetables that they scavenged from the mud in the market.
Luisa was just one of millions of vulnerable women in similar situations.
Nora Binda is a Mozambican woman who had a heart to help widows in her community, so she and Carla Reinagel teamed up in 2015 to create a sewing school to empower women like Luisa.
Their goal was to find a permanent solution to lift these women out of poverty and restore their ability to hope and dream for their own futures again.
The sewing school started small, with Carla giving classes two to three times per week in the back of a church, with seven students sharing three borrowed machines.
Like most new students, Luisa struggled at first, but gradually built both her skills and her confidence.
After producing enough items for us to sell, Luisa was able to earn her own sewing machine! She became part of a new sisterhood community with her fellow students. She heard that God loves her and sees her. And she left the school with both the skills and the tools for a new life.
Today we have empowered over 80 women like Luisa to have a new start in life!
Women who had completely given up on life have learned how to dream again, and many of them have taken great joy in teaching and passing on their new skill to other needy women in their communities.
Graduates and Testimonies
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