Peruse this site for a history of profiles and insightful analysis on feminist entrepreneurship.
And, be sure to sign up for rabble.ca’s newsletter where Liisbeth shares the latest news in feminist spaces.
Author:Meral Mohammad Jamal
Meral Jamal (she/her) was born and raised in a family of 20 in Dubai, UAE. She is a journalism and history student at Carleton University in Ottawa, ON, and the newsletter editor and editorial assistant with LiisBeth. You can find her sharing her favourite books and movies on Twitter and Instagram.
We’re kicking off the first Rabble Roundup of 2021 with a look at the riots in the U.S. Capitol earlier this month, the Proud Boys, and how the attacks reflect the interconnectedness of white supremacy, racism, and inequality. Here are our top picks that dive deeper into this.
As its title suggests, this Rabble article by Democracy Now! host Amy Goodman and columnist Denis Moynihan look at the experiences of racialized congressmembers such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortéz and Pramila Jayapal during the riots at the Capitol. It also looks at how “the violent white-supremacist insurrection at the U.S. Capitol on January 6 put the ugly realities of racism and inequality in this country in stark relief. Taking these on remains the urgent challenge of our time. Trump’s departure from the Oval Office is only the first step.”
Through the experience of the wrongful arrest and consequent imprisonment and torture of her husband Maher Arar, Monia Mazigh looks at the complexities of defining a person or and organization as a “terrorist.” She talks about the not-so-distant past when the “mere pronouncing of this word signified mobilization for human rights, activism against security certificates, pushback against Bill C-51, and the physical and emotional drain these campaigns meant for me and many activists. When you have been labelled a terrorist, you are usually a Muslim man — and by all legal standards it is one of the worst accusations, if not the worst, to have made against you.”
Nevertheless, Mazigh says she believes that the Proud Boys must be labelled a terrorist group, “Not because I like the labelling, but because it is a matter of simple coherence. Up to now, white-supremacy violence was hidden and protected by mainstream institutions — until it exploded in the world’s face in front of the U.S. Capitol.”
Read her words in rabble.ca on the harm caused by both the word “terrorism” and the act itself, and how we must move from calling out white supremacy to actively condemning it.
In the wake of the Washington insurrection, NDP leader Jagmeet Singh suggested the Canadian government list the far-right group Proud Boys as a terrorist entity. Both Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Conservative Leader Erin O’Toole were quick to say Singh’s idea sounded like a good one. And yet, many activists believe it may not be.
In this rabble.ca article, rabble’s politics reporter Karl Nerenberg looks at the consequences of listing an entity as terrorist in Canada. This includes the fact that authorities could seize a listed entity’s property, or they could force the terrorist-listed group to forfeit some or all of its assets.
In our roundup this month, we’re sharing content from Rabble that looks at different themes, ideas, and conversations that feminists are engaging in right now. As a feminist, womxn’s entrepreneurship publication, we’re interested in what the feminist movement—and the action resulting from it—looks like at the moment. Here are our top picks for Rabble content that dives into this.
As the headline suggests, this Rabble article looks at how the Trudeau government’s broader foreign policy is decidedly non-feminist, and their “feminist” marketing legitimates those policies.
The article looks at how the Liberal government has responded to some key feminist foreign policy issues, including its opposition to negotiate a treaty to abolish nuclear weapons, remaining silent on the feminist win in Bolivia, and trying to oust a Nicaraguan government in which women hold half of all cabinet positions and 45 per cent of the legislature.
Building grassroots, decolonial, intersectional feminism
In this episode of Rabble’s Talking Radical Radio podcast, writer and media producer Scott Neigh interviews Angela Marie MacDougall and Jennifer Johnstone, about Women Deliver—an international non-governmental organization focused on gender equality and women’s rights they have cofounded together. We also hear from Rhiannon Bennett, a Musqueam woman and the decolonization and accountability consultant for Feminists Deliver.
Through the podcast, we hear about the work Women Deliver has done, especially during the pandemic. This includes online public education events focused on things like anti-Asian racism, anti-Black racism in Canada, decolonization in the age of reconciliation, and most recently one called Towards Liberation: Beyond 21st Century Capitalism featuring luminaries like Angela Davis, Pam Palmater, Harsha Walia, and Erica Ifill.
‘Take Back the Fight’ should be mandatory reading for young feminists in Canada
In this book review by Vancouver writer and organizer Rayne Fisher-Quann talks about why Nora Loreto’s new book Take Back the Fight: Organizing Feminism for the Digital Age is “a manifesto, a scathing criticism of the status quo, and a call to action for the next generation of feminists all in one.”
Fisher-Quann talks about how Loreto’s book covers everything, and “meticulously examines Canadian feminism’s past, present and future,” creating a blueprint for feminist movements in the modern age.
founder of Liberty Co, an organization helping to increase the participation level of the neurodiverse population in the workforce,
a champion for the Inclusion Revolution, a worldwide movement launched in 2018 to spearhead broader thinking about disability, especially disability employment,
advocate for gender equality through the #women4women collective,
co-founder in 2019, with Liz LeClair, of the National Day of Conversation, a digital conversation about the issue of sexual harassment of fundraisers in the charitable and nonprofit sectors.
Wanda Deschamps, co-founder of National Day of Conversation (NDOC), Nov 26 2020.
LiisBeth: Why did you start a conversation on this topic?
I’ve been a gender equity advocate my entire life. And I worked in the charitable sector for a generation—25 years. I have noticed questionable behaviour, inappropriate behaviour. I have certainly been aware of the sexism…and the lack of equity at the top. Seventy per cent of our employees are women, yet we participate at about 30 per cent of the leadership level.
But it didn’t all come together until my experience at the University of Waterloo. I was sexually harassed for the three years that I was there. And I complained, and I experienced retaliation.
On Jan. 2, 2019, I was—like so many people—reading the national headlines for the first business day of the new year. It was a cold, dark morning. And I saw the oped in the CBC by Liz LeClair where she shared her own experiences of sexual harassment as a professional fundraiser.
I sat there, stunned. I did not think, given my experiences, given the retaliation, that someone would speak out that way. And so, I was in touch with Liz right away, as were a number of people.
Gradually, our movement was born and we decided on a day of conversation about sexual harassment in the charitable and nonprofit sectors. And that’s how we got to where we are today.
LiisBeth: How has COVID-19 affected equity in the charitable sector, and how does the National Day of Conversation address that?
The pandemic has highlighted inequity and the charitable sector is part of that inequity. But awareness does make a difference; addressing an issue begins with awareness. You can’t address inequity if you don’t think there’s a problem. When I was walking home last year from our in-person session, I thought we are making it increasingly difficult for people to say: ‘I didn’t know. I didn’t know there was a problem. I didn’t know there was an issue. I didn’t know so many people were affected by this. I didn’t know that it was having such an impact.’ And after the online sessions on Nov. 26 this year, I believe that we will feel the same way.
LiisBeth: What do you hope people take away from the National Day of Conversation this year?
On November 26, at 11:59 PM, will our work be over? No.
We need to keep doing what we’re doing; we need to keep the conversation going.
We say that we have a trifecta call to action: promote the day in your social media channels, join the conversation online, and register. And we have hours of virtual dialogue and speakers lined up from across Canada and beyond who are thinkers, leaders, advocates, experts, so we believe there’s something for everyone to learn.
Participate in the National Day of Conversation by posting and sharing content with the hashtags #NationalDayofConversation and #NDOC on your social networks, and start a conversation at your workplace about the sexual harassment and assault of fundraisers – review organizational policies and support systems with leadership.
Both her parents played. Her mother was especially interested in ones based on stories and puzzles, recently testing out one that Boersma is developing. Boersma was a fan of games made by Sierra Entertainment, a woman-owned and led company co-founded by Roberta Williams.
So, she never understood the perception that women don’t enjoy video games. She co-founded her own company, Sticky Brain Studios, in 2013. But a year later, the GamerGate controversy exploded and Boersma saw indie women game developers and critics horribly harassed online, some even leaving the sector because of it.
That’s when Boersma determined that video games are not the problem—the toxic masculinity within the community is. She recognized a lot of things needed to change—and that she could lead that change, making the digital content company she founded with colleague Ted Brunt a feminist antidote to an often sexist industry.
Building a diverse team
The cofounders met while working together at Marble Media in 2008, Boersma in business affairs and Brunt in content strategy. Both were helping create interactive digital content for TV with a strong focus on kids. While each of them ended up leaving Marble for their own reasons, around 2012 they found themselves getting hired onto the same projects as freelancers, with Boersma in business development and funding, and Brunt in content strategy and development.
They soon realized they had complementary skill sets to run their own studio and combined their 30 years of experience to start Sticky Brain, focusing on creating family-friendly digital content primarily for young Canadians.
Having worked together before helped the partners hit the ground running. Neither wanted a hierarchical structure for their organization, a primary reason they decided to employ people on a freelance and contract basis. It has freed them from having to manage a full-time staff and given them flexibility to work from home and on their own time. As a result, Boersma, who is neurodiverse, and Brunt, who is an active dad, are able to plan their days in the way that works best for them.
That strategy has also enabled them to work with a wide range of people, including other stay-at-home dads. Says Boersma: “In the digital and tech sector in a heterosexual relationship, the women take the year off and have a kid but, often, they’re highly educated and they want to get back to work. And then the dads are like, ‘I want my time with my kid.’”
Boersma and Brunt both knew a slate of stay-at-home dads eager to work around their kids’ daycare and nap times. “It’s funny,” Boersma adds, “because sometimes we think about feminist business practices as all about supporting women with kids. But I think of the fact that we can support dads’ engagement with kids, in a way that supports women too … to me it’s about supporting what a family unit needs.”
Working with a diverse group of people has also helped Sticky Brain create diverse digital content, including the award-winning Bath Time and Peekaboo Pugs video games for kids based on the Cutie Pugs live-action TV series; and The Restricted Adventures of Raja, a digital graphic novel and game created for RedRover, a US charity that helps animals rescued from disasters or neglect as well as animals with life-threatening illnesses. The aim of the Raja project is to teach children aged 7-11 empathy for animals and how caring for them will mean fewer animals suffering in shelters.
Most recently, Sticky Brain launched Kimono, an app that enables users to design kimonos and dress up kimono dolls—while they learn about Asian culture and the role clothing plays. Created by a team of Southeast Asian developers, Kimono is the brainchild of Sticky Brains artist and animator Connie Choi.
Creating feminist content
When taking on projects, Boersma says the Sticky Brain team considers two things: is the content is family friendly; and does the organization employing Sticky Brain want to work collaboratively? “Are the clients our partners? Are they wanting to be engaged? We’ve worked with a number of small independent studios in Toronto who love working with us because they enjoy the fact that we’re collaborative. We don’t just take the idea and go away and say, ‘Here’s the final thing, approve it.”
Sticky Brain is currently collaborating with Bloom Digital, a Toronto-based feminist narrative gaming company led by independent game designer Miriam Verburg. Their first game, LongStory, is an LGBTQ+ friendly dating sim (think simulation) designed to foster stronger relationships and inclusivity. Sticky Brain is also turning LongStory into a web series about queer teenagers that Boersma hopes will encourage conversations about different gender identities and sexualities amongst teenagers and the gaming industry as a whole.
Brunt sees such projects as a way to tell and share stories that mainstream gaming companies don’t. “We love doing work that we think supports positive change in the world and that helps people who are underserved. Those are the things that are not necessarily financially hugely rewarding because that’s how pop culture works. But that’s okay with us because we’re fine making a reasonable living by making good things.” He adds that building diverse creative teams has, over the years, “brought certain people together who seem to make something greater than their individual skills.”
Implementing feminist business practices
This summer, Boersma participated in Fifth Wave Labs, Canada’s first feminist accelerator for women in digital media. Created by the Canadian Film Centre’s (CFC) Media Lab, the program helps accelerate and sustain the growth of women-owned and led enterprises in southern Ontario’s digital media sector.
Boersma says interacting with other feminist entrepreneurs prompted her to think through critical questions: Can a profit-seeking business be considered feminist? What does it mean to give back to the community?
For Boersma, the answer to the first question is “yes”—if the vision and mission of the company is feminist. For her, a feminist business must uphold certain ethical values—paying its employees properly, minimizing impact on the environment.
“There’s a whole lot of movement around people to be like, ‘No, we’re going to shake up how we do business and how we participate in the economy,’ and I find it all really fascinating. So, I’d like to have the label of “feminist business practices” for what we’re doing. And I like that there’s other companies that are trying to do this as well.”
In an industry that is ripe with toxic masculinity patriarchal practices, Boersma says that changing the industry also requires upending institutions, beginning with digital funds and investors. “For a lot of us who are women or femme identifying, when we’re trying to get the funding, it feels like it’s much harder.”
Boersma recently applied for funding for a project with two Black Canadian filmmakers, telling the stories of enslaved African Canadians through virtual reality. The feedback she received for the proposal? Women don’t enjoy VR games.
“We have to work extra hard to show that there is a potential audience for what we’re doing because people see this work as niche,” says Boersma. “And yet study after study shows that 50 per cent of gamers are women.”
But she is not deterred. She believes the only way to change things in the industry is to stay in the industry.
“I think in video games in Canada, we have an opportunity to grab all these stories and experiences that are not currently being told by the mainstream gaming industry and create them to serve specific audiences.”
Publishers Note:Sticky Brains Studios is a participant in Canada’s first feminist accelerator program for womxn in digital media, Fifth Wave Labs. The Fifth Wave is a year-round program offered by CFC Media Lab and its partners to support the growth and development of women entrepreneurs in the digital media sector in southern Ontario. All enterprise founders in the Fifth Wave community are selected for both their potential and commitment toward weaving intersectional feminist ideals of equity and fairness into sustainable and scalable business growth strategies. Fifth Wave Initiative is committed to 30% participation by members of underrepresented groups. The Fifth Wave is a LiisBeth Media partner. Apply here today.
The Women in Technology venture fund administered by the Business Development Bank of Canada is betting that bigger is better -and that just one woman equals change. But does it?
LiisBeth spoke with Cukier about the recommendations in the report, the challenges presented by COVID-19, the support women need moving forward and what women’s entrepreneurship should look like in the future.
LiisBeth: What was the process of pulling off such a mammoth report during a global pandemic?
Wendy Cukier: We had the report ready to go when COVID-19 hit, so we shifted gears. We did a lot of work with the government and others to get information out on supports for women entrepreneurs. We ran webinars, and we also very quickly did an analysis of programs and consulted with close to 300 groups and entrepreneurs on where the gaps were. So, we took on a bit of an advocacy role for self-employed women and those who were falling between the cracks. And then with COVID-19, what we showed very quickly and very clearly was that COVID-19 was amplifying inequality in a very significant way.
LiisBeth: What was the process of collecting this data?
Wendy Cukier: I’ve done lots of work on things like the wage gap and the impact of unpaid work. When COVID-19 hit, just with my own eyes, I saw the impact on people in my office, on entrepreneurs. I was working with the data that was coming out of different places, but even on Zoom calls, you’d be bombed by little kids all over the place. And it was so very obvious—the difference in terms of the extent to which women have always borne the lion’s share of the unpaid work.
The impact of COVID-19 on…women entrepreneurs’ self-reported productivity…layoffs, the extent to which women entrepreneurs reported negative impacts on their ability to run their business and even their mental health—all of those things are very much supported by the empirical data from different surveys, but quite honestly, I saw it all with my own two eyes.
LiisBeth: What are some of the key findings in the report?
Wendy Cukier: The big thing is the burden of unpaid work, and that is just crushing. Not just for women who are in the workforce, but women who are self-employed or entrepreneurs. It doesn’t really matter if you’re rich or you’re poor. Certainly, people who are lower on the socioeconomic front are often less well equipped—they often don’t have access to high-speed network…a workspace. But even wealthy middle-class women have lost their caregivers and other kinds of supports that had previously enabled them to pursue their entrepreneurial activities. So, the experience of the crushing burden of unpaid work and childcare is pretty severe, right across socioeconomic classes, across sectors, across size, across everything.
When we look at what’s happening with women entrepreneurs and the programs they need to support them, we need to recognize self-employment across a range of sectors—not just tech—as well. If we don’t tackle that definitional problem, we’re effectively ignoring the needs of 900,000 women entrepreneurs. Because we know that women are more likely to be in services, in social enterprises. So not recognizing that excludes a big percentage of women.
We also recognize there are big differences in the experiences of women who are racialized, women who are Indigenous, women who are in rural communities, women with disabilities. And what we showed was COVID-19 was exacerbating all of those.
One of the things that makes me apoplectic is there’s been a ton of stuff about how women have been leading the battle against COVID-19. Jacinda Ardern (the prime minister) from New Zealand. In Canada, leading medical officer, Theresa Tam,—we see her every day reassuring us, it’ll be fine. It’s women, women, women on the frontlines. Yet, if you look at who is being consulted and testifying before the parliamentary committees on what we need for the recovery, 51 per cent of the population (women) is pretty much missing.
I think what’s hugely important is that we have a gender and diversity lens for recovery or we’re going to lose decades of progress.–Wendy Cukier
LiisBeth: What are some of the recommendations of the report?
Wendy Cukier: Well, we have enough information to prioritize certain things like thinking about childcare and homeschooling; making sure that we have intersectional lens; that we understand that access to broadband and infrastructure is absolutely fundamental; and the impact of COVID-19 is highly differentiated based on where you live. It’s a whole cluster of things, and if you don’t have those basic needs, then it’s pretty hard to engage in economic activity. Those things are pretty straightforward.
One of the things I have a preliminary sense of, but we haven’t dug into as deeply as we need to: There are a lot of funding opportunities for incorporated companies that are already at a certain level of sales. So while there may be gaps there and … bias in financing… especially the venture capital space, what I’m really interested in right now is how we deal with pre-revenue, small revenue, micro-businesses that seem to have fallen through the cracks. If you think about the fact that women’s businesses tend to be smaller, newer, and under financed, it’s almost like chopping down all the seedlings. We have to really be attentive to nurturing those early-stage organizations, some of which may never grow, some of which may remain side hustles or supplements to traditional employment. If you care about growth, you also need to care about the fact that these new startups and micro-businesses that women tend to start are being crushed.
LiisBeth: Thank you so much for speaking with us!
LiisBeth Media is a 100% womxn-owned and led, reader supported media enterprise. If you enjoyed this story and would like to see more, please consider becoming a $10-25 one time donor today! [direct-stripe value=”ds1586445031902″]
The Sitti Soap team at the Women's Centre in Al Jerash Refugee Camp, Gaza.
(Photo provided by Sitti Soap)
The Sitti Soap team at the Women’s Centre in Al Jerash Refugee Camp, Gaza. (Photo provided by Sitti Soap)
Noora Sharrab and Jacqueline Sophia are co-founders of Sitti Soap, a social enterprise that educates, employs and empowers women from the Jerash “Gaza” refugee camp in Jordan, by bringing lifestyle products such as hand-pressed olive oil soaps created by refugee artisans to North America. LiisBeth recently spoke to the cofounders about their venture.
LiisBeth: How did you both come to work with the refugee community in the Jerash camp?
Jacqueline Sophia: I’d come to Jordan in 2011 as a Fulbright fellow. Initially, I was there to take on a very academic approach to my time, looking at the third-party response to gender-based violence in the capital. That quickly changed. I had experienced a lot of pushback and cultural barriers to those conversations. It was and still is a very taboo topic. But in the meantime, a friend of mine put me in touch with someone who was working with the refugee community in Jerash camp. They had known I had a background working with the refugee community resettled in Baltimore City during my time at university. They said, why don’t you go to this community? They’re looking for a volunteer yoga instructor. And so, I contacted them and I said I’d be happy to volunteer.
Noora Sharrab: My parents were born in Gaza. I was born in Dubai, and I grew up here in Canada. When I decided to do my master’s program, I actually went and did my primary research in Jordan. And that’s where I dived right in with the refugee community. I did a specialization in refugee and forced migrations. I was really interested in learning more about Palestinian refugees. And as a Palestinian myself and as someone who didn’t grow up in a refugee camp, I was really interested in what it was like to identify being Palestinian but living out of a camp compared to someone who was a Palestinian but happened to live in a diaspora.
LiisBeth: What inspired you to create Sitti?
Jacqueline Sophia: We had yoga classes [at the camp] and I got to really know the community that way. Over time, the women and I would begin to work on different enterprise ideas. They really wanted to earn more steady income for their families. And I think they saw me as a link to the market that existed for them outside of the camp—I was always coming back and forth from the capital Amman, and so we started working on different enterprise ideas.
We explored the idea of Palestinian embroidery, and selling that in the form of different clothing items. But it was very labour intensive—it took a lot of time and it was hard to control the quality. We were also looking at food production for a while, but that didn’t work out so well. Then one day, one of the women in the camp said she wanted to show me something. She opened the door, and there was this amazing smell of lavender. It was some 300 bars of olive oil soap.
Essentially what happened was the Italian embassy came in and did a soap making workshop with these women. But the embassy taught this workshop and then left, and so the women had all this soap and didn’t know how to market or sell it. In the meantime, I was introduced to Noora and she was doing the exact same thing with another group of women in the same camp. So we were like, let’s just work together.
Noora Sharrab:It’s very common among development agencies and international agencies—they will come into these refugee communities, they’ll do this big workshop, this big training, and then they’ll leave. So you have these women who ended up being skilled, and it’s really hard for them to take it on from there. We know 8 out of 10 businesses that start end up failing within the first two years because they don’t have the right support, the mentorship and the capital. The resources available are very limited, let alone for a refugee trying to do this.
Sitti soap gift set
LiisBeth: What was the process of building Sitti?
Noora Sharrab: Shortly after we partnered up, we launched a women’s centre slash soap workshop because these women were making soap out of their homes. We wanted to be able to control the environment and control production and the manufacturing process, so we had to build a separate, dedicated area. We ended up creating a centre out of an existing home in the camp because we also wanted to make sure we remained in the camp—if we were to leave it would make it difficult for the women to access because commuting back and forth would be an added cost for them. We didn’t want to have them worry about that.
Shortly after we launched the women’s centre, I relocated back to Canada because I was having my second child and I wanted to be closer to family. At the same, Jackie also ended up moving out of Jordan. But both of us were like, we can’t stop this project because we both left. So we brought it [the business] with us. When I came to Canada, I ended up registering the company as an LLC.
Jacqueline Sophia: As for our team, there’s two employees on the ground in Jordan—Sophia is our regional manager and she oversees quality control. Amina is the facilities manager. And then we have our nine female artists and soap makers. They are a mix of regular employees, and then we have several part-time staff. The regular employees receive a regular salary every single month, and the part-time employees work on a project by project basis.
LiisBeth: What have been some of the challenges of working within a refugee camp?
Noora Sharrab: I don’t want to generalize all families and all communities because they’re not all the same, but there continues to be cultural sensitivities—to not have the woman out after dark or to limit them from travelling to the city. Some of them still need permission to be able to work and to be able to go to school to be able to go out. So, you still have that dynamic where having that male counterpart is important. When we first started the workshop, and we had recruited some artisans, it was very important for us to get family approval for these women. Not in a sense like they need permission, but we wanted their families to feel comfortable and to feel like their daughters, their mothers, their wives were coming into a safe space.
For us—Jacqueline and I—we were seen as these foreigners who came in and opened the centre. And even though I am Palestinian, and I am originally from Gaza, and from an identity perspective, I could relate—I’m still that foreigner that lived abroad, that spoke differently, that wasn’t part of the community from that sense. So building the trust and building that credibility and transparency in the community was fundamental.
LiisBeth: Why did you choose to work with women refugees?
Noora Sharrab: When Jackie and I came together, we realized that this was not about the soap. This was about the resiliency of these women who—for some of them—it was the first time they ever got a job. Some were the sole breadwinners of their family, supporting eight to 10 people. It was like this one woman deciding, I’m not going to sit here in poverty. I want to do something about it. So, for us, we didn’t see the soap as the soap itself, we saw it as more than that.
Sitti continues to be about a mission that is about education, employment and empowerment. It’s about creating self-reliance for these women who for their entire lives have had to depend on aid and charity. How could we change that dynamic? How could we empower them?
LiisBeth: How has the pandemic impacted Sitti?
Jacqueline Sophia: I think this transition may have been easier for us than for some. We already had those communication pathways established as a remote team, so it wasn’t difficult to act quickly. We weren’t in a position where we had to say, how are we going to talk to each other on a weekly basis? So that was not difficult.
The difficulty [has been] that with a social enterprise, you don’t tend to have a lot of runway in place, and so when you experience a sudden socioeconomic downturn like we’ve experienced with a pandemic, you have to triage. Our concern, first and foremost, was our staff in Jordan, specifically in the camp. Priority number one was to ensure that they had enough income, enough wages to help support themselves and their families because as soon as the pandemic happened and the socioeconomic collapse happened, those women were the only breadwinners, they were the only wage earners in their families. So we worked with our online network of consumers and different partner organizations. We worked with another women-owned business in Canada, and we created a crowdfunding campaign to bring in enough funds to provide relief kits essentially to over 170 families in the camp who are most in need.
LiisBeth: What’s next for Sitti?
Jacqueline Sophia: We have a whole lifestyle product line that includes 10 or more products at any given moment, so soap is not the only thing we sell. That being said, it is what we do best. And so, at a time like this, it’s important for not just the refugee community, but for the global community to be very aware of the public-health concerns that include washing your hands every day. These are things that we’re certainly elevating in our messaging, and we’re working with other corporate partners and corporate clients too—to help them spread that message.
Most people in refugee communities are not earning a steady salary. They’re certainly not earning benefits. And there are structural barriers in place to prevent that from happening. As a company there are only so many things we can provide to our employees because of their refugee status. So, what we’re trying to do is encourage people who are willing to purchase our goods right now by saying, if you’re in a position where you can financially support us as a customer, maybe you can also support us from a charitable perspective. So, at checkout, for instance, can you offer an extra dollar towards a support fund for our employees?
We’re also working to release a crowdfunding campaign [later] this year that will serve several purposes. First of all, it will serve the immediate needs—as in the next 12 months or so. It’s meant to bring in the capital that we’ll need in order to kind of cushion the blow of the economic downturn, and provide wage support for all of our employees to help them continue to help the business continue to run at a reduced capacity.
Jacqueline Sophie: [The campaign will] support additional operational costs for us to pivot the business and create new products to bring to market that will be awesome. It will set us up for success when things do eventually bounce back.
LiisBeth: That’s awesome. Good luck with your venture and your campaign!
Did you enjoy and find value in this article? Please consider helping us publish more of them! LiisBeth is an indie, womxn-led/owned media outlet. We depend 100% on reader donations. Please consider a contribution today!
The Best of Rabble–Curated by LiisBeth
