By Stefene Russell
Photograph by Mark Gilliland
At the edge of Granite City, on a military base-turned- industrial park, behind an unassuming door affixed with a small green sign, you’ll find the headquarters for the Blessing Basket Project. Though its accommodations are modest, its goals are anything but.
The nonprofit is the brainchild of Theresa Wilson, a former television news reporter. The baskets are meant to be a place to gather up tangible reminders of what’s good in one’s life. But they also provide a means for impoverished weavers in Ghana, Papua New Guinea, Bangladesh, Indonesia, Uganda and Madagascar to send their kids to school, start their own businesses, plant crops, and in some cases escape prostitution or a violent marriage.
Back in 1999, after a personal crisis, Wilson was the one who was struggling. She created the first “blessing basket” as a way of finding a way through her heartache.
“People were sending me cards and letters of support,” she says, “and I started collecting them in a basket. At the end of a hard day, I’d read them and remember that people had made an investment in me—and I owed it to them to make it.” After rebounding a bit, she began speaking to women’s groups, describing how the basket had helped her pull through.
“The women were like, ‘I want one, where’d you get that?’” Wilson laughs. “And I had to tell them, ‘Well … I just sort of made it up.’”
They encouraged Wilson to market her idea. So while still working as a special project manager at KTVI, she began selling baskets with a small orange card attached—the same tag used on the baskets today—explaining the Blessing Basket concept.
“I kept selling them out everywhere,” Wilson says. “Then I started getting calls from women all across the country who had given these as gifts. One woman called me and said, ‘I just put Bondo [glue] in my Blessing Basket. My washing machine was broken—the agitator kept jumping up and down—so I glued it, and now I don’t have to buy a new washing machine.’”
Soon Wilson, who was buying the baskets wholesale from China, wanted to benefit the basketmaker as well. She “sent an e-mail to the world,” in search of weavers and 80 people from nearly 30 countries responded. At first, she thought she could work with them all, but the group of savvy business folk she tapped to help her get the organization off the ground advised her to start small. “They were like, ‘Ahem, excuse me—O energetic one, you can’t work with 28 countries at first.’” Though they currently work with only six of those 28, that still means paying a “prosperity wage” (four times what the local market can bear) to nearly 3,000 weavers, as well as reinvesting in projects that benefit each village. A girls’ school has gone up in Ghana, with a solar-powered irrigation well to follow in 2007. Whole Foods, which carries Blessing Baskets nationally, refunds 100 percent of the profits—contributing significantly to the $200,000 the nonprofit has paid out so far and Wilson hints at bigger things to come: she points out a fabric sample on her desk. “This is a hand-printed fabric from Ghana,” she explains. “We actually have a couple of designers looking into our fabrics, with the possibility of producing an exclusive line for some pretty serious names that we can’t go into right now. So that’s waiting in the wings.”
Meanwhile, there’s a shipment of baskets from Madagascar, where Wilson has partnered with the Missouri Botanical Garden in a joint effort to ameliorate both poverty and environmental destruction. The basket design was tweaked with feedback from supporter Carole Buck, who gives Blessing Baskets almost exclusively as gifts. Another fan is Becky “Queen of Carpet” Rothman. “I keep Blessing Baskets on hand here at the office so I can give them out,” she says. “When people get them, the message goes out and that big circle grows. You feel good for giving it, because it benefits the person who receives it and you’re helping the person who made it … Theresa is my example that one person can change the world.”
For more information, visit www.blessingbasket.org.
