Today for Kappa Phi (a Christian women’s group I’m involved with on campus) we sold “Threads of Hope” bracelets in the Student Center. Impoverished women and children in the Phillipines make these bracelets and charity groups in the US can buy them to sell for $– sending the profits back to the families that made them.

The bracelets themselves are beautiful and of course I bought 3 just sitting at the table with them, but upon some further research I realized just how great this sale is.

On their website you can read more about how women in the Philipines, especially Manila (a big tourist center), sell these bracelets to tourists on the beach. While many visitors find these women bothersome they are actually preserving their children’s childhood by choosing this method of financial gain over others. Some families in the Philipines, according to the website, have to resort to child slavery or prostitution to gain enough money to live. By choosing to make and sell bracelets instead women are able to save their children from that kind of life.

As someone whose incredibly interested in how tourism can impact societies this was really interesting to me and got me even more excited about this charity. By sending hundreds of dollars of bracelets to us in the US to sell these women are able to make money much faster for their efforts. I’ve never been to Manila, but it certainly seems like there are some incredible people to meet there.