Words by Smiley Team
How would you cope if you were forced to leave your homeland and rebuild your life? Love Welcomes is a creative social enterprise that helps refugee women do just that.
It creates jobs refugee women so they can – quite literally – stitch their lives back together by upcycling beautiful, handmade products that are sold worldwide.
"It provides above a living wage and enables these women to integrate into society," Abi Hewitt, co-founder and CEO of Love Welcomes, tells Smiley News. "And it gives them the ability to find self-empowerment within themselves, enabling them to make decisions for their families, and for themselves.”
Love Welcomes started in 2017, in response to the European refugee crisis, where we saw mass migration on the shores in Greece and Italy. "We wanted to see whether there was a case for creating a work-based programme and initiative that enabled women to have something to do each day, something to learn, some way of integrating into society," says Abi.
“What we realised is once you leave the camps that were on the islands, you're not in survival mode anymore, and you’re ready to start doing something – you’re ready to learn, you want to contribute, and that’s where we stepped in."
(Read more about this charity which is using floristry as a tool for social good)
The women at Love Welcomes make all sorts of different products that they then sell. The money from those sales pay salaries and also gets reinvested into the refugee community in various contexts, explains Abi.
Now, world renowned artist Banksy has teamed up with Love Welcomes to commission refugee women to hand sew mats using life vests found on Lesvos beaches.
“My ambitions and hopes for Love Welcomes are to be able to create more micro-community workshops, where people can trust each other, become friends with each other, and enable work for more people," adds Abi.
“It’s really important as a society that we start to really think of refugees as being human beings, and worthy, and an asset to our community."
(Read more about this woman helping to empower refugees in need of clothes)
Abi adds: “The problem for us right now is that we still view them as an issue, something that we need to try and solve.
"There’s nothing that we need to solve. We just need to welcome them with open arms and give them a chance, to actually be the person they were meant to be, and that’s what I think Love Welcomes does.
“If we genuinely welcome with love, it enables so much to come out of each individual, it enables them to feel confident, and feel able to be part of society, and that’s what’s most important. No one should feel on the fringes of society, when they’re really trying to integrate.”
You can shop the Love Welcomes collection at lovewelcomes.org and help support Abi's mission in the process.
