Cousins Laurien Meuter & Pepe Heykoop.
For four generations, a community of traditional basket weavers sat along Mumbai roads and sold their goods. But after it became easy to buy cheap plastic baskets from China, suddenly they had no work. As "untouchables," on the lowest rung of the Indian social hierarchy, they couldn’t easily get other jobs. With little or no education, young women from the community often ended up working in the red light district.
Laurien Meuter, a Dutch bank employee who happened to be working temporarily in India, decided to help, in part by creating a new international market for products made by the women. She decided to take a different path than the traditional fair trade project: Her nonprofit, the Tiny Miracles Foundation, is working with women to make designs that look nothing like what they might have made in the past—not crafty, or Indian, or even homemade.
Instead, Dutch designer Pepe Heykoop is creating custom products that a global market would want to buy regardless of where they’re coming from, not out of any sense of guilt or responsibility to support the workers, but because the designs stand on their own.
From a design perspective Pepe and Laurien have always strongly believed that consumers should buy their products first because they like the design, secondly because of the story. In their opinion, this is the most sustainable way of creating many, many jobs.
After experimenting with a few products, Pepe designed a paper vase that can be folded flat to ship in an envelope. Sewn in a geometric pattern, the paper form can be adjusted to cover a bottle, making an instant vase. The construction is easy to make, but time intensive, so the women have plenty of work. Since the launch of the vase beginning 2013, Tiny Miracles has been able to provide full-time employment for 80 people. After the Paper Vase Cover, the women began producing a flatpack lampshade, wallpaper leaves and more products will follow.
Unlike many other fair trade projects, Tiny Miracles is also going well beyond employment. Laurien and Pepe believe that to break a poverty cycle, you need to tackle issues in all areas of their life, not only just give them work. Tiny Miracles educates parents on the importance of sending children to school, and then helps send the children in the community to better schools where they can learn English and technical skills. Adults are given classes in money management, family planning, and dealing with addiction. They also provide free access to health care.
By 2020, Tiny Miracles has one goal: To help lift all 700 people in the community from extreme poverty to the middle class.