By Danielle Warren and Wickham Boyle | Project Founders
Our organization continues to grow and to set high goals and standards for ourselves and the participants in our Just Shea Program.
We have just submitted to USAID - at their request - to assist the expansion and replication of the Just Shea Program you have been supporting. It improves access to safety, healthcare and education for shea harvesters and their families in Northern Ghana. It is a tremendous honor even to be asked to apply and, so while we wait with fingers crossed, we are also celebrating that our work to date has been noticed by such an august international funder.
Further in that arena, we spoke at the Global Shea Alliance Conference in Manhattan. There were experts from around the world addressing issues such as establishing standards for safety and quality with this increasingly growing commodity. Earlier in the spring, founder Danielle Warren was asked to speak at a division of this same conference in Abuja, Nigeria.
Danielle also spoke at a Global Health and Innovation Conference at Yale and the co-founder of our social business arm (Just Shea) Wickham Boyle will be addressing a group in August about social business in the beauty industry. We are attempting to utilize both our growing acumen in the fields of shea and social business to improve the visibility of the women sheanut harvesters and to grow our networks of influence and impact.
As a result of our growing network, photographer Adam Ottke came to Gushie, the village in Northern Ghana where our pilot program is housed. Adam took some truly stunning photographs, which we have submitted to the upcoming GlobalGiving photo competition. Stay tuned for more on that!! (They will also be available to donors through GlobalGiving this December!)
Our social business Just Shea, has been experiencing some much deserved notice since expanding to two more retail venues in New York in the last few weeks. Our products will now be carried at Donna Karan’s Urban Zen stores in Manhattan and in Sag Harbor, Long Island.
Since our last report, you have helped us raise the funds to provide and distribute 25 additional sets of protective gear for the women shea harvesters who are a part of our collective program in Gushie. This gear protects them from snakebites and allows them to work more efficiently, thus garnering them a better harvest.
We are also in the process of training new members of the Gushie Just Shea Collective. In addition to the 50 women we now have in the program (Wooohooo!) a further 57 women have also just been trained by our in-country program director Fatimah Zubair. The training allows women to harvest more safely and to store and sell a higher quality product!
Another huge place of pride for us is that, as a direct result of the collective silo, the harvesters were able to DOUBLE their earnings this past spring. As our fundraising efforts continue both on GlobalGiving and in future in-person events, we aspire to give protective gear to an additional 100 women who have signed up for the program.
Join us in celebrating our work and perhaps take a moment to enjoy a short, 2 minute, film produced by our young, and oh so talented intern Isa Goldberg as part of her high school senior project.
We are ever proud of all the women who grace us with their energies, passion and prodigious talents.
With Gratitude,
Wicki, Danielle, Fatimah, Lucy, Isa and the Gushie Just Shea Collective
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