The Reality Our Women Live In

     To truly understand the amount of good that Good Threads does, it’s important to understand the situation of most of our employees.  Most are Haitian immigrants, few with legal documents.  They immigrate to the Dominican Republic, where they endure extreme hardships and discrimination, in the hopes of making a better life for themselves and their families.  Unfortunately, Esperanza offers few opportunities for these women.  Listed below are their options. I want to stress I have yet to meet a Haitian woman in Esperanza who does not support herself in one of the following ways.

Good Threads worker, Leona, shows off her finished stitch of a customer's request for a mountain range.
Her baby girl sleeps on her chest. 

• They can sell stuff in the street, be it food or clothes, and make just enough to get by.  Not enough to feed their families meat, or pay for school supplies or medicine, but enough to pay rent and put something on the table, usually rice or plantains and maybe a few eggs if they are lucky.  In order to sell any items they need working capital to buy the food or clothes, and this is beyond most Haitian women. 
• They can do seasonal field work.  This is inconsistent and low-paying.  On top of being a low paying job, the pay is unreliable. Sometimes a field worker will work for a few weeks and when it finally comes time to get paid the owner of the field will either short them or just not pay.  In this case the women have few recourses to get the money they are owed.
•  They can find a house or two to clean, but again consistency and hours are a major issue.  Cleaning one or two houses one day a week is not going to pay the bills, and full time cleaning jobs are quite rare.  The supply of labor also greatly outweighs the demand for labor.
• They can find a man who works to support them.  This is generally not an option for those with older daughters, as abuse and molestation are extremely common in situations in which a man lives with an older step daughter, 11+ years old.  One of our oldest and best employees, Yansi, is a single mother who will tell you she cannot get a man because her daughters would not be safe if she brought a man into the house.
• The last option is prostituting themselves, which is common place in the community.  I do not believe I have to go into the issues with this job. 

            In a nutshell, they can find sporadic income but jobs with consistent, decent pay are rare.  This creates an insecure home environment, which is damaging to their children and own psyche.  Working for Good Threads not only offers them significant benefits, like access to loans, banking and health care services but is also the best, most consistent paying job they will find.

Our average employee makes about 250% more making belts than they can make in any other job available to them.  The security and peace of mind we offer cannot be overstated.  They do not have to worry that they will not be paid for their work. If rent is due and they are a little short they know we will loan them what they need. When their children get sick, they know we will pay the medical bills and they can get loans to buy stuff to sell on the side.  All of this does wonders in creating a good home environment for their children and significantly increases their self-esteem and confidence.

                Our goal is to help these women and their families and we act in accordance with our goals.  It took some time, but at this point our women know and have internalized the fact that we are here to help them.  This has inspired loyalty; if a woman is slacking or not treating a belt well other women will tell me about it and chastise the offender.  In short, we offer, hands down, the best job any of these women have ever had. They will all tell you that and it is the reason why the list of women who want to be trained to make belts has over one hundred names on it.                

Two Sides, One Coin: Good Threads and the Joan Rose Foundation

Good Threads, like many companies, has a give back.  For every belt sold we feed a child three meals a day for an entire month.  What I believe separates Good Threads from other companies is how closely we are linked to the non-profit we give to.  I personally founded and run both Good Threads and the Joan Rose Foundation. Good Threads’ top employee is also the cook for the Joan Rose Foundation, about ¾ of GT employees have children at the Joan Rose Foundation, and the Joan Rose Foundation development center is our operational headquarters.   

                Simply put, without the Joan Rose Foundation, Good Threads would not exist.  Supporting the JRF and our children’s mothers was the primary impetus to start the company, and we are staffed entirely by women in the neighborhood in which the JRF operates.  Our connection to our employees and their children cannot be overstated.  When our top employee got married she asked me to walk her down the aisle, as she does not know her father.  Over half of our employees call me the father of their children.  I have been teaching, providing for and supporting these kids every day for almost 4 years, and at this point they are truly my family. 

David, Good Threads Founder, poses for a picture with one of his beloved families. Yansi, GT belt stitcher, is the mother of Felina, Milka, and Yanirisa, who have been attending the JRF since 2010.

                For me, Good Threads and the Joan Rose Foundation are two sides of the same coin.  Since founding the JRF my goal has been to help people help themselves.  To help them lift themselves out of abject poverty.  For children I believe education is the best way to do this, and for grown women I believe a good job and steady source of income is the best way.  I believe to my core that if someone is willing to work hard and behave responsibly they deserve the chance to live with dignity.  Being evicted from your house is not dignified, watching your children cry from hunger is not dignified, having to sell yourself to keep your family out of the street is not dignified.  Unfortunately these are the hardships that many Haitian and Dominican women in Esperanza are forced to deal with on a daily basis.  They are not in their current situation due to their work ethic or character, they are in this situation because they were born into it.  Everyday the Joan Rose Foundation strives to give kids born into this situation a way out and everyday Good Threads strives to give women living in this situation a way out.   Two different approaches to help fix the same problem. Two sides, same coin.  

Our top employee, Leidy, sitting left, trains the women during foundation hours. In the background you can see one of our kids eating lunch. 

The Dawn of Good Threads

This blog will focus on the impact of Good Threads.  I will write about the impact we have on our employees, on the community we work in, and the foundation we are partnered with.  The desire to help these people is why we started Good Threads and continues, to this day, to be the main reason we keep putting in the work to make this business successful.  I believe exactly what we do for these people can be hard to communicate, and I hope that this blog helps everyone better understand our impact.

One of our top employees, Christina, stitches a belt at the foundation while cuddling her baby. Chrstina is 27 years old and has three children under the ages of 7.

As this is the start of the blog, it seems appropriate that I tell you about the start of Good Threads.  My name is David Palmer, I am 27 years old and have been living in the Dominican Republic since January 2010.  In 2010 I founded the Joan Rose Foundation, a development program dedicated to giving children access to opportunity and basic necessities.  We provide food, education, clothing, medicine, legal documents, and emotional support for 110 children daily. Good Threads provides a child at the Joan Rose Foundation with 3 meals a day for an entire month for each belt sold.

Since starting the foundation three years ago, I have consistently been bothered by the lack of work available for most of our children’s mothers.  As you can probably imagine, most of the children at our foundation come from single mother households.  Ninety percent of the kids at our foundation were born to Haitian immigrants.  Haitian women have virtually no job options in Esperanza, the city in which we work.  Due to discrimination, their illegal status and a lack of education, most formal jobs are not available to them and the informal jobs are inconsistent and low paying.  These women are by and large extremely hard working.  They are not impoverished and unemployed due to laziness, some sense of entitlement or a lack of responsibility.  They simply have almost no opportunity to obtain a legitimate, consistent, decent paying job.  

Since I started the foundation, I have been trying to find some kind of job that these women could do.  During the winter of 2012 a buddy of mine told me about needlepoint belts and how they were quite expensive, growing in popularity, and extremely labor intensive.  At the time my knowledge of needlepoint was literally zero; I had never even heard of it.  I started doing some research and came to the conclusion that this might be what I had been looking for.  

My younger brother, Timmy, was at the time working in the finance industry.  He did not feel fulfilled by his job and was dying to start a business that helped impoverished people.  He had recently graduated from Princeton and had written his senior thesis on how business was helping the poor help themselves.   

I told him about my idea and he loved it.  My time was limited and training women how to make needlepoint belts was going to fill my plate.  Timmy took on the whole American side of the business- the website, sales, marketing, etc, and I started trying to make a needlepoint belt.  It was not easy and we went through a lot of prototypes before becoming satisfied with our product.  We currently employ 22 women, most of whom have children at the Joan Rose Foundation.  Seeing the improvement in these women’s and their families living conditions, self esteem, and their increased independence from men, who tend to be abusive, has been incredibly rewarding.  

Timmy has since left the business for the military and Omar Eid, a childhood friend of Timmy’s, has taken over his role.  We continue to grow and experiment with new ways to help our employees help themselves.  I will be posting every week or two and look forward to sharing more of our story and impact with all of you.

Co-founder, David Palmer, and a few of his best workers.