NEW Fair Trade Products at Our East Store — Silk Flowers!
This Silk Paper Flower Hibiscus Collection features a selection of five tropical flower stems in purple, pale yellow, soft peach, pink, and orange that look like the real thing but are actually meticulously handmade using carefully crafted silk paper petals and jute paper wrapped wire stems with vibrant green leaves. Stay tuned as our East Store will soon have more varieties of flowers, such as cosmos and dahlias.
Prokritee (meaning "nature" in Bengali) manages several handicraft enterprises and helps other groups sell their products in local and foreign markets. Prokritee and its enterprises provide jobs for marginalized rural women in Bangladesh. Equity for women is one of the fair trade principles, and a very important one since women often do not have opportunities for income in the global south, especially in rural areas. By providing these job opportunities, Prokritee improves women’s standard of living and helps them send their children to school. The organization provides skills development training to their artisans. Prokritee creates and promotes income–generating projects that benefit the artisans, adhere to good safety and environmental standards, and provide the potential to become self–reliant. Prokritee was established in 2001 as an independent organization. Ten Thousand Villages has purchased products from Prokritee and its predecessor MCC Bangladesh since 1986.