Change our city.

COFFEE & TEA

Our Coffee & loose-leaf Teas are crafted with the highest quality beans and leaves, but more importantly, pays fair wages to farmers and values their hard work, giving them the dignity they deserve.

CHOICES THAT IMPACT

Do you want to live a life that impacts your workplace, home, community & the world?

Your morning drink, baked good or ethical fashion purchase are helping to eradicate poverty while providing hope to survivors of human trafficking, homelessness, addictions or extreme poverty, locally & globally.

CONNECT

Meet others, like you, who want to impact the world. Join us as we partner with organizations and social enterprises, who are seriously committed to alleviating poverty, while empowering refugees & survivors of human trafficking.

YOUR PURCHASE MATTERS.

Life can be overwhelming and hardships can become paralyzing. For many people in America and around the world, poverty, addictions, or obstacles to employment are everyday norms. You don't have to live in the slums of India, or in urban communities in America to experience hopelessness. It's right here in the suburbs of America.​ Obstacles to employment and the lack of opportunity can often cause hopelessness in families as generations sit in refugee camps or experience trauma from human trafficking, abuse or violence.But what if we can do something about it? What if we choose to make a difference through how we live daily through our purchasing power? What if, together, we chose to have eyes to see and do good through our everyday normal activities, like purchasing a morning java and a scone at your local coffee shop? Through creative ideas and innovative solutions, like social entrepreneurship, we can create solutions to the world's biggest problems.

YOUR PURCHASE MATTERS. Together, we can end poverty and make human trafficking history.

WHY SOCIAL ENTERPRISE?

My Half of the Sky, L3C is organized as a Low-Profit Limited Liability Company. Although social enterprises seek profit, their main mission is to encourage positive social change, using Capitalism - not government programs or charity - as a tool to defeat poverty and suffering worldwide.Social Enterprises also provide dignity to low-income men and women and those who have obstacles to employment. Relationships founded on one person's giving, and another person's receiving can often cause hierarchies in relationships which often yield unhealthy outcomes of dependency, entitlement, and greed. Social Enterprise is a creative system of exchange built upon mutual respect and pride.​Social Enterprises, like My Half of the Sky, create strategies for poverty alleviation because it establishes social and economic opportunities through long-term trading partnerships with marginalized producers and artisans, placing the interests of the marginalized as the primary concern over the enterprise. Through ethical standards and fair practices, as well as long-term partnerships with businessmen and women, we can build leadership and create sustainable development. Social Enterprises utilize the marketplace to build revenue in order to support low-income artisans, locally and in developing nations, to move toward economic self-sufficiency while allowing value-driven individuals to promote sustainability and opportunities to alleviate poverty and prevent human trafficking. Artisans receive fair wages, education, financial and technical assistance, and safe working conditions, which promotes respectful relationships between business partnerships.​Through establishing long-term partnerships with already established social enterprises, both non-profits and for-profits, that partner with marginalized artisans around the world, My Half of the Sky provides products that change lives.

CHARITY VS DEVELOPMENT

Because women are marginalized in society, poverty often leads to making human trafficking the norm in many communities around the world. Our desire is to create employment, train, and create a marketplace for their goods so that girls and women have other choices to live as self-sufficient participants in society. Because research indicates that when one woman is pulled out of poverty she brings four people with her, our primary support is for women. ​

Many of us grew up on a charitable model, known as one-way giving, which often fuels distrust among those who have and those they are serving. This model of charity is necessary at times-- during disasters and other occasions. But when charity is used as the only form of helping, it can not only be harmful to the community, but it can be harmful to the recipient of this kind of giving. They are no longer seen as valued members of society but rather, as weak ones waiting to be rescued.What if there is a better way? What if we adopted a humble posture that gives people value, dignity and purpose through work? When we hire people or purchase their products, the exchange is honorable - fueling dignity, hope and purpose.

"Ancient Hebrew wisdom describes four levels of charity. The highest level is to provide a job for one in need without his knowledge that you provided it. The next, lower level is to provide work that the [person] knows you provided...​We know from 40 years of failed social policy that welfare depletes self-esteem while honorable work produces dignity. We know that reciprocity builds mutual respect while one-way giving brews contempt. Yet we continue to run clothes closets and free food pantries and give-away benevolence accounts and wonder why the joy is missing... Perhaps it is our time and place in history to re-implement the wisdom of the ages and to fashion contemporary models of thoughtful compassion" (Compassion, Justice and the Christian Life, Robert D. Lupton, p. 27).​​

When we invest in lives and develop individuals, we are reminding them that no matter what they have been through, they have value and that there is hope. Dignified work empowers and changes generations of families world-wide.