Category Archives: Sewing Partners
Ethiopia Shipment Number 1, March 2017
Depending on our inventory and funding, Pedals for Progress / Sewing Peace is always looking for new partners. A good place to look is at the Convention of Laureates of the European Environment Foundation (EEF) in Freiburg, Germany. As an EEF Laureate, Dave attended the 2nd International Convention of Environmental Laureates in 2013. It was there that Dave met Samson Tsegaye, Ethiopia Country Director for the Solar Energy Foundation, a German NGO that installs solar systems in rural areas in Africa.
Samson has made a proposal to the Solar Energy Foundation: with the help of Sewing Peace, he plans to train and equip 70 women to set up their own sewing businesses. The women to be chosen for the program are widows, orphans, single mothers, or from other at-risk groups. The women will get three months of training in sewing and tailoring. The program will pay travel costs plus provide food and housing during the training. Trainees who complete the program will get a sewing machine, with the understanding that they will use it to set up a sustainable small business.
Samson’s proposal sounds perfect for Sewing Peace, so we agreed to supply the sewing machines and accept a new program partner. We were able to help because of financial support from two of our generous donors: thanks so much to the Clif Bar Family Foundation and the Jack & Pauline Freeman Foundation.
Because this is our first shipment to Ethiopia, we expected a learning experience, and we got one! Import laws vary wildly and inexplicably by country. The Ethiopian Revenues and Customs authority demanded information for each machine. So Robert and Dave opened 72 boxed machines, removed them from the boxes, recorded the make, model and serial numbers, and then repackaged them. Our new Tinkerer, Simon, went online with that information to find the dates of manufacture, also required. After we supplied that first batch of information, Ethiopian Customs decided that we also had to include country of manufacture. Simon signed up to refurbish sewing machines, not to deal with government red tape, but he went back online, beyond the call of duty, to get information on country of manufacture for each machine. Let’s hope that’s the last of the delays.
The 72 machines are now on their way to Ethiopia. When we get new information, we will report back.
Shipping Treadle Machines for Sewing Peace
Pedals for Progress has shipped sewing machines since 1999. In 2015 we created the Sewing Peace brand as a way to carry on our sewing machine activities separately from our bicycle activities. Publicizing sewing machine collections separately can be more effective than always making them part of our bike collections. And shipping sewing machines separately can be more effective because we can ship them to groups that specifically want sewing machines and may not even have a bicycle program. Plus we can ship a few dozen machines on a pallet rather than shipping an entire container, which costs much more. So we’re adding a new emphasis on sewing machines to our ongoing bike programs.
Most of the sewing machines we collect are electric portables. They are relatively small, and, when we do ship them with bikes, they add no shipping cost because they fit nicely nestled among the bikes in our regular shipping containers. Most customers of our overseas partners have reliable electricity, so the portables offer a great way to earn a living.
Besides electric portables, we also get a few old-fashioned treadle sewing machines, almost all made by Singer, which do not use electricity. These are gorgeous, well-built machines: almost entirely metal and super reliable. With occasional lubrication and a new belt every few decades, they can last 100 years or more. They are beautiful: the machines themselves, the cast-iron structure with the treadle and band wheel, and the wooden cabinets.
If we have room in a container of bicycles, we sometimes ship an entire treadle machine without disassembling it, wooden cabinet and all. But it takes up a lot of space — about the same as 4 bikes — so it is a questionable tradeoff for our bike-shop partners.
But now as part of our Sewing Peace program we sometimes ship sewing machines separately from bikes, and we’re trying a new way of shipping treadle machines.
Over the past couple of years, we’ve accumulated about a dozen of these treadle machines, so we decided to disassemble them and ship everything except the wooden cabinets, which are just too big. We put the sewing machines themselves into our standard Sewing Peace cardboard shipping boxes. We zip-tie the metal support structure together with the treadle and band wheel. We can load up a pallet with four walls of boxed sewing machines, electric and manual; and then we put the metal stands inside the walls of boxes.
Our overseas customers are incredibly resourceful and creative. We feel certain that, even without the wooden tables and drawers, they will be able to build whatever they need to make the machines useful.
We believe that even our customers with electricity will appreciate these machines. And we do still occasionally get requests from partners where electricity is scarce or unreliable: from parts of Fiji and Africa, for example.
Here’s hoping that these wonderful old treadle machines find new lives abroad and offer another way for people in our partner countries to make a living.
New Partner in Tanzania: Tanzania Women and Youth Development Society
Fall 2016 InStitch
Pedals for Progress has a new partner in Tanzania: the Tanzania Women and Youth Development Society (TWYDS). The foundation is a non-governmental, non-profit organization founded in 1994 in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, West Africa. TWYDS has programs in education, health, business, agriculture, natural resources, and policy advocacy.
In June 2016, with the generous support of the Jack & Pauline Freeman Foundation, we shipped 74 sewing machines to TWYDS. They will offer training in the use and maintenance of the sewing machines and then distribute the machines to the people they’ve trained with the goal of improving their standard of living.
P4P picks partners based not only on their sewing machine or bicycle programs, but also on their other projects in their communities. Our partners often focus, for example, on education, business, or the environment. TWYDS has programs in all these areas. But from TWYDS we hear stories we do not hear from our other partners. TWYDS founder Sophia Mwakagenda has more than once been called on to rescue girls from underage marriages. These marriages are illegal in Tanzania but still occur because of tradition and because of the poverty of the girls’ parents. In April 2016 Sophia was approached by the mother of an 11-year-old Masai girl who, for 16 goats, had been sold into marriage to a 75-year-old man. With the help of the police, Sophia had the girl released from the arrangement and brought back to school. (The Sunflower Foundation of Australia has programs for the education of Tanzanian girls.)
We welcome the Tanzania Women and Youth Development Society as a new P4P partner. Good luck with the Sewing Peace project and all your other excellent work.
Fall 2016: Tanzania Number 4
Dave and Gary packed 75 sewing machines into a cube, now bound for Tanzania.
Fall 2016: Sewing Machines in Vermont
Mary O’Brien and Ham Gillette with 30 of the 43 machines collected at the Springfield, VT, transfer station. We will be boxing them up in advance of the September 24th collection by the Green Mountain Returned Peace Corps Volunteers.
New Partner in Fiji: Rise beyond the Reef
Fall 2016 InStitch
In a shipment of bicycles to Fiji sponsored by the Friends of Fiji, Sewing Peace included 20 sewing machines which were donated to Rise beyond the Reef, a Seattle-based nonprofit organization focused on improving the educational infrastructure, health, safety and economic development opportunities for women and children throughout rural communities of the South Pacific.
15 Years of P4P Collections, An Appreciative Retrospective
by Jackie Johnson, Granby CT
Fall 2016 InStitch
I wrote an article for the Spring 2011 InGear that began as follows:
I was prompted to call Pedals for Progress in September of 2002 after I read a small article in Hope Magazine (long since out of business). The article told the story of Dave Schweidenback launching Pedals for Progress following his experience in the Peace Corps and referenced the 57,000 bicycles that had, at that point, been shipped to partners in sixteen countries.
So, to take you back in time a bit, it was a year beyond 9/11 and our nation was on the verge of war in the fall of 2002. I was feeling a burning need to do something positive and meaningful, ideally involving my husband and two children who were then ten and twelve. The article was so inspiring that I immediately called P4P and said I wanted to organize a collection. Despite my being further from High Bridge (in northwestern Connecticut) than any previous collection, the response was positive and I was encouraged to organize a spring collection. I ultimately spoke with Dave and explained that I really didn’t want to wait until spring. He was reluctantly convinced and our first Pedals for Progress collection was held at Holcomb Farm, an arts and environmental center, in Granby, CT, on December 7, 2002. A very chilly 42 bikes were collected and processed that day by an enthusiastic group of volunteers who have shown up every year since.
Five years from the time of that first article, we just held our 15th collection, with a grand total of over 2,000 bikes and more than 100 sewing machines collected to date. While making a difference for individuals and communities in the developing world has always been at the heart of our 15 years of collecting, there has been an unexpected benefit in the community created here at home. Many donors are moved by the opportunity to build a bridge from our small Connecticut town and to touch lives abroad and offer to help spread the word about future collections. Our dedicated group of volunteers has grown to include a long list of folks who have shared email addresses and offer to post flyers and share through social media each year. Stories shared by donors, like that of the bike of a lost and beloved daughter, the sewing machine from a mother or grandmother, have created meaningful moments and stories that have fed and inspired our group of volunteers.
This year, we welcomed two new volunteers who took the lead in coordinating the Granby collection. Kate and Rachel are high school students and National Honor Society Members at the local high school. They eagerly publicized the event and brought in a new group of student volunteers. Kate and Rachel plan to use this year’s experience to mentor two students from the class behind theirs, continuing to grow a committed community of young people.
Being part of the P4P community for 15 years has been a privilege and great source of joy. We here in Granby look forward to gearing up for many more!
Kyrgyzstan, a land beyond
by David Schweidenback
Fall 2016 InStitch
In preparing for this newsletter I tried to reach out to a number of programs from a number of years ago trying to get some feedback as to the longevity of the sewing machines we ship. Programs are always excited when they receive a shipment but my goal was to ask how they would feel about it six or eight years later. Did it really help? The main problem in this attempt was finding some degree of connectivity. People change email addresses and in many of the places we work people are not looking at their email every day; in fact they might not even have email.
In 2008 with the aid of a Peace Corps volunteer named Roberto Hernandez, Pedals for Progress shipped 25 sewing machines to Cholopon-Ata, Kyrgyzstan. I know Roberto is back in the United States, and I’m pretty sure he’s in Los Angeles, but do you have any idea how many people named Roberto Hernandez there are in Los Angeles and the surrounding area? This type of research is fraught with dead ends.
Then one day not too long ago an email appeared from Nurila Choloponkulova from SOS Kinderhof, which ran the program in 2008. She certainly remembers the program. It was designed to bring in women who needed to learn a skill, teach them to sew and then return them to their villages to practice their new talents. Nurila understood what I was looking for but these ladies left to go home with their sewing machines eight years ago.
With a bit of searching and traveling around, Nurila was able to find eight women who still owned the sewing machine and had been using them every day to earn a living since 2008! I was astounded; at least a third of the sewing machines were still functioning after eight years! And quite possibly many more; she just hasn’t yet found them.
And the final result of my searching is the incredible story of Jipargul.
Jipargul is a mother of six children. Her husband passed away, leaving her with the responsibility to care and provide for their children. Because of the time needed to care for six children, she had not been able to find steady employment, making it difficult for their basic needs to be met. She could not find any help in her small village in the mountains, so she came to the Family Strengthening Program (FSP) to receive training and support.
Through FSP, she enrolled in sewing classes where she learned how to professionally produce and alter clothing, traditional Kyrgyz mats/blankets and souvenirs. After completing her courses, she was one of the only villagers in her area to know how to perform this important work. So she went from being an unemployed struggling mother to a successful business owner providing for the needs of her community.
Without the donated sewing machines from Sewing Peace, none of this would have been possible. Not only did these machines allow for the Family Strengthening Project to offer courses, but extra machines were given to beneficiaries like Jipargul so that they could work at home while raising their children.
With the success of her business, Jipargul was able to move out of her two-room apartment to a larger house. The generous donations from Sewing Peace have changed the lives of Jipargul and her family, and ultimately the community that she is serving stitch by stitch.
Postscript: with connection to SOS Kinderhof reestablished, and the continuing generous support of our donors, it was just a natural instinct to make another shipment of sewing machines. On July 18, 2016, an additional 30 sewing machines arrived in Cholopon-Ata to further promote the Family Strengthening Program of SOS Children Village Cholpon-Ata. This is an expensive program, as everything going to Kyrgyzstan must be sent airfreight, but with such a record of success, how can we not continue the program. This second shipment will be distributed in the Issyk-Kul region.
Progress Report for End of Fiscal Year 2016
On 30 September 2016 we drew the curtain on our activities for fiscal year 2016. (The P4P fiscal year runs from October 1st through September 30th.)
In 2016 P4P collected 36 more bicycles then we did the previous year. And as for sewing machines we had an almost 13% increase in machines collected.
(On 9/30/14, the end of fiscal year 2014, we had 365 bicycles in inventory.)
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Fiscal Year 2015 Bicycles Shipped |
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Fiscal Year 2016 Bicycles Shipped |
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(On 9/30/14, the end of fiscal year 2014, we had 50 sewing machines in inventory.)
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Fiscal Year 2015 Sewing Machines Shipped |
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(On 9/30/15, the end of fiscal year 2015, we had 20 sewing machines in inventory.)
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Fiscal Year 2016 Sewing Machines Shipped |
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