March 8th 2013 marked the 102nd celebration of International Women’s day and our partner Women for Women International has organized a month-long campaign celebrating women internationally.
Siiri Morley, our Executive Director, was featured on Women for Women International’s March for Women Campaign as a business women they love! Congrats Siiri!
Click on the logo above or on this link to view the feature.
We tend to talk a lot about the abstract sides of our pilot program in Haiti - women’s entrepreneurship, reaching global markets, giving women agency over their lives, creating an ecosystem of support for women in the country, etc, etc. But what does our actual work look like?
While I’m here in Haiti, I thought I should include some more photos to make it all come to life a bit more.
Here’s the building on the Terrier Rouge farm where the candle-making will happen:
And here are the beehives where our wax is sourced:
Here are some of the first beeswax candles coming out of their molds:
One of our first candle-makers, Landy, spending time with our translator, Johanne:
And these are their bicycles that bring them to and from work:
Regine, our Interim Country Director, working in the pilot project building:
We are so honored to have you joining us for our candle entrepreneurship journey here in Haiti. Stay tuned for more!
I’m back in Haiti. One moment I was cross-country skiing in Boston and the next on a tropical, sunny island sweating and dying to take off my heavy jeans that kept me warm on an overly air-conditioned flight. It’s always a joy to be in Haiti (for many reasons besides the warming sun!) and this time is no different. As Executive Director of a new nonprofit, my days are very distracted and busy when I’m in my Boston office. In Boston (or while traveling in NYC or Washington DC), I’m running from donor meeting to donor meeting, writing grant proposals, working to keep our systems and finances in order, maintaining communications, figuring out how to grow a team on a shoestring, and collaborating with my fabulous board to ensure that all the pieces are coming together in a strategic way. Determining our priorities is always a challenge with so many things on our plates.
But when I’m in Haiti that chaos subsides a bit. In part by force because good internet is rare here and I’m not as tied to my email account as I usually am. When I’m in Haiti I am completely immersed in our programmatic work. Here I step away from my computer and stand in the building where we’re piloting. I speak with the first two women in our program. I sit and plan with our women’s NGO partners. I walk by beehives that will produce our beeswax and learn how the beeswax is prepared for candle-making. I watch Haitian candles emerge from their molds.
Here I have time to sit back, reflect, and engage in long conversations with stakeholders. When I’m here, the reasons we chose to launch in Haiti become crystal clear.
I know why we’re launching in Haiti, but it can be easy to forget them when buried in paperwork in Boston.
Thank you to UMCOR and our Founding Catalyzers for helping us get here and launch our work. It is so important what we’re doing. By investing in women long-term as economic change agents - whose work then ripples out to impact the lives of bee-keepers, artisans, and all of their families/children - we are working to create long-lasting, Haitian-led economic development here in northern Haiti.
Hopefully by the end of this trip I will have narrowed down the pool of candidates for our Operations Manager position. I hope to have that person hired by early March and soon after recruit the first pool of women, conduct candle-making training, and then offer work readiness training. Very soon you’ll be seeing more Haitian candles, ready to reach customers just like you.
We really are creating change, one candle at a time.
~ Siiri Morley, Executive Director
What a joy to have so many of you join us to celebrate the launch of Prosperity Catalyst! We narrowly escaped the historic blizzard that is now hitting Boston and had a seamless evening filled with great company, inspiration, food and drinks.
Thank you to everyone who came out to show your support. We couldn’t do what we do without you. Your continued support will make our work a wild success - not to mention a lot more fun!
For more photos of the event, be sure to visit our Facebook page.
Great news! After a lot of planning and fundraising, we’re ready to launch our pilot project in Haiti. In just 10 days, Executive Director Siiri Morley will head to Haiti to get things rolling alongside our partners - Ayiti Nexus, North Coast Development Corporation, AFASDA and Femmes en Nord. This spring we’ll have plenty of other updates, but for now we wanted to share this video with you.
If you were at our Launch Party last night in Boston you already had a chance to see it, and to hear personal stories from Siiri, Board Chair Linda Strohmeyer, co-hosts Jackie Vanderbrug, Karen Ansara and Anita Brearton, and special guest Kathy LeMay.
For those of you who weren’t able to join us, we hope this will give you a taste of what’s to come:
Thank you to Jeanne Dasaro of Wonder Women of Boston for creating the video, organizing the event, and setting up this website! You truly are a Wonder Woman, Jeanne.
I’m headed to Haiti again next week. Now that our first funding has come through, we need to make sure that things are lined up and ready to go in Northern Haiti for 2013. The most important step in doing so is to find the right Operations Manager for our work. This Haitian team member will be a pivotal part of our work as she’ll be overseeing all of the training, candle-making, social support, and acting as a liaison between our partners in Haiti, our team in the U.S., and our funders. Also supporting this position will be the incredible team at Ayiti Nexus – a dynamic women-led consulting firm which is helping us with our recruitment of apprentice entrepreneurs and work readiness training.
I’ll be squeezing this trip in to Haiti just before the holidays to interview some of our top candidates for the position, build on our partnerships with AFASDA and Femmes en Nord, and record more video footage so we can share our mission with you in a video. I’ll also be attending a dinner focused on women’s entrepreneurship with group of visitors from the Stanford School of Management.
As we build on our Catalyzer Campaign in 2013, I’m looking forward to traveling to Haiti with some of our Founding Catalyzers to meet the women that we are working directly with. Will you join us?
We have a lot to celebrate! Will you celebrate with us in Boston on February 6th for a Prosperity Catalyst launch party? After several years of building Prosperity Candle, our for profit social enterprise sister organization, Prosperity Catalyst has been launched to complement its work. Siiri Morley, a Founding Partner of Prosperity Candle, is so honored to now be bringing Prosperity Candle Co-Founder Ted Barber’s original vision of a social enterprise and nonprofit organization working in partnership to life with Prosperity Catalyst.
We’ve made a lot of progress in the past few months, but we need your help to grow! We’d love to share our model with you and introduce more of the team. Come join us for drinks, light food & celebration of our progress. Bring your friends and colleagues and learn how you can engage directly with us to catalyze change for women around the world!
I have been speechless quite a bit over the last few weeks. And for anyone who knows me well, you know that that is very rare. I am just so humbled and honored by the support that has been extended to me as I launch Prosperity Catalyst in its first few months.
Just 3 months into the life of Prosperity Catalyst, we have been honored to receive two grants to launch our work in Haiti. We are truly humbled that our model of economic empowerment for women resonated so deeply with these two funders.
Days before Thanksgiving I received word that our very first grant was awarded by UMCOR. We have so much to be thankful for in regards to our relationship with UMCOR. UMCOR is devoted to relief efforts around the world and has been deeply committed to our shared vision of empowering women through fair trade efforts – they have been a wonderful ally to Prosperity Candle, our sister organization, in purchasing and promoting candle sales and sharing our story. Now UMCOR’s $50,000 grant will help fund our pilot project in early 2013.
And two days after Thanksgiving,I received an email from the State Department’s Ambassador for Global Women’s Issues, Melanne Verveer, letting me know that Prosperity Catalyst had been awarded an inaugural WEAmericas grant for $60,000. The WEAmericas small grant initiative (which stands for Women’s Entrepreneurship in the Americas) is a new program that has been launched to support innovative approaches to fostering job creation and entrepreneurship for women throughout the Americas. We are honored to be one of the inaugural grantees.
We have a lot to be thankful for this year.
Ambassador Melanne Verveer noted when she met me in late November 2012 that the Prosperity model of empowering women through business opportunities with sustainable links to global markets is exactly the type of model they were looking to support. She said “It is an honor to be funding Prosperity Catalyst’s work in Haiti. Now we have to sell those candles!”
We are enormously honored to have this early support from such visionary leaders in our field. Thank you to UMCOR and the Office of Global Women’s Issues at the State Department for believing so deeply in our work. We will make you proud.
~ Siiri, Executive Director
Prosperity Catalyst’s Executive Director Siiri Morley recently had an opportunity to talk about her October trip to Haiti on ITVS’ Beyond the Box blog. Check out an excerpt below, and read the whole entry on the Beyond the Box blog!
When I was planning my most recent trip to Haiti, I couldn’t have foreseen that Hurricane Sandy would force my early departure. Just hours before my plane evacuated, I was knee deep in the launch of Prosperity Catalyst’s Haiti initiative. Prosperity Catalyst is the nonprofit sister organization to Prosperity Candle, the social enterprise that empowers women to rebuild their lives through business and entrepreneurship.
Elvire Eugene, the Founder and Executive Director of AFASDA, is a tenacious woman with an extraordinary amount of energy and heart. She is simultaneously strong and warm and when she enters a room, the women she works with light up and are automatically drawn to her. With fire in her eyes, she talks about the critical importance of rescuing women and girls from violence in their communities.
The Association Femmes Soleil d’ Haiti (AFASDA) is a nationwide women’s association in Haiti that helps women navigate and fight against the challenges of gender-based violence. In a country where it is estimated that 90 percent of women will experience some kind of violence in their lifetime, AFASDA’s work is substantially important. Elvire shared stories of young girls who were raped by neighbors and stories of women who were continuously abused — even mutilated — by their husbands. Yet these women decided to stay in the household in fear of what would happen to their children if they left.
These are the stories that make your blood run cold and are the stories that need to be told. Each one I hear renews my dedication to women’s empowerment, time and time again . . .
Read the rest of the entry on the ITVS Beyond the Box blog!
