Artigianati.com

by Candice Shih

It’s not often one will stumble into a fashion design business while working with a charity in Uganda.

But it happened to Kallie Dovel, a 2008 graduate of Vanguard University in Costa Mesa.

Uganda is still recovering in many ways from a civil war, and Dovel met some of the women affected by the bloodshed in a refugee camp in Gulu in 2007.

She noticed they made necklaces from beads rolled from paper and trash and sold them to whoever might pass by.

When Dovel, now 23, returned home, she brought back boxes of the necklaces with her, sold them and sent the money back to these women.

“It got our minds rolling,” said Alli Swanson, a friend and now business partner. “How could we do this?”

Now Dovel, Swanson, Anna Nelson, Brooke Hodges and Jessie Simonson — all recent graduates of Vanguard — run a jewelry and shoe company called 31 Bits.

The name comes from the Bible’s Proverbs 31, which describes a woman providing for her family. The “bits” refers to the bits of paper from which the beads are made.

Having started out with six women in Gulu, 200 miles from Uganda’s capital of Kampala, 31 Bits now employs 60 women......

Read more at  -  http://stylebinge.freedomblogging.com/2010/05/28/jewelry-made-from-trash-in-africa-finds-value/32289/