We are taking the following actions as a company to insure this commitment:

1.       We will continue to pay the 41 men and women with whom we work with on a yearly basis; even though all of our production has come to a full stop due to quarantine restrictions in Colombia.

2.       We are allocating a budget to support 100 artisanal families for 1 month.

TO SUPPORT OUR START UP you can help us by purchasing any product on our e-shop.   We pledge all profits from sales on our website from Friday March 27th to April 27th to create a fund destined to pay for continued financial to the craftsmen that work with Maison Alma on a regular basis even though production has come to a full stop.

1. An artisanal community of 90 artisans and their families, who live in the Guacamayas village, in Boyacá, Colombia.

WHY DONATE?

We urge you to participate, as the artisanal communities are now entering a critical situation that will only continue to worsen:

• These communities have no safety net. Their earnings depend on work on to week to week basis. Unlike Europe, the government does not provide unemployment aid in time of crisis.

• All work has come to a full stop. These communities used to receive orders every week from around the world, but everything has been cancelled due to the closing of stores and frontiers.

• Almost 50% of the adults in artisanal villages will be unemployed: Artisanal work represents most employment sources within these ultra-specialized villages. Leaders who dispatch the work to the entire population are now facing unemployment and panic within their communities.

• 95% of artisans are women, who sustain their family economically in an average household of 4. The men of the village work in the fields but concentrate on single crops – on which the village cannot rely on as nourishment. Thus, helping one artisan means helping an entire family.

• They have no alternatives except us: Transportation between villages and cities has stopped, which blocks them to ship their existing merchandise. Some cannot even go to the bank in the nearest villages due to quaranteen, so they can’t access the few savings to buy food.

HOW THE PROCEEDS WILL BE EMPLOYED EXACTLY:

For the artisanal communities:

An entire village unemployed and idle, in quarantine, is a village that will suffer. For this reason; we have decided with the community leaders that all funds will be used to EMPLOY the families, and to pay each individual for crafts. This artisanal work can perfectly be done respecting the self-isolation measures, as they are crafts that are done AT HOME.

This way, we are not only financing the purchasing power to get groceries; we are helping the artisanal cooperative to create stock of their crafts that they will be able to sell in the future. Your donation will be an economic multiplier.

For the micro-entrepreneur workshops in Bogota:

Strict quarantine does not allow any of the individuals to keep working in their crafts – as no ‘home-office’ measures can apply to these crafts far away from their sewing machines and tools. Livelihood in Bogota is quite expensive, and prices for basic commodities are surging in non-central neighborhoods. This will help the mirco-entrepreneurs to pay the salaries of employees that do not work for Maison Alma, despite no economic activity.