In August this year, HFL staff traveled to Cambodia to assess Villageworks and, after that process, towelcome them as our newest global partner! We were introduced to the founder Anak and her team through our Canadian partner, Tenth Church.
I got home November 3 from an HFL team trip to Cambodia, and a number of the most impactful moments on the trip were with Villageworks. VW is a fair-trade business making bags out of recycled and repurposed plastics and fabric. The business also works to preserve and sell Cambodian artisan crafts and linens made by rural women. Watching the VW staff design and sew garments, learn workplace wellness together, and prepare food together was both a humbling and heartwarming experience.
Villageworks employs 30+ staff, many of whom are differently abled with significant disabilities that have excluded them from making a living wage to support themselves and their families. The business began in the village of Baray, 20 years ago, to provide local rural women with wages through the sale of their handmade artisan crafts and linens. This was transformative for the families of these women. Anak had joined the business as a young intern who wanted to make a difference for some of her fellow Cambodians by eradicating poverty through work income. Eventually, she bought the business.
A number of years into Anak’s ownership of Villageworks, Anak received a vision. While in Phnom Penh, she saw a disabled woman begging on the streets and had this thought and conviction: I can figure out a business model to employ this person, so she can have a meaningful job and a community of Christian people to love and support her.
She stopped right there and asked, ‘Would you like to have a job?’
And Villageworks in Phnom Penh began.
Doing the work of growing a competitive business in Asia is hard. When the bottom-line of the business is equity and inclusion before profit, the business model is challenging at best. It is the same in Canada but even more so overseas due to the harsher economic inequities and systemic injustices.
Visiting the Villageworks factory is dramatically different than visiting the oppressive garment factories of Phnom Penh. The small manufacturing floor—including sewing and design spaces—as well as a café, storefront, and communal eating area, all have a welcoming and open feel. It's clear the work culture values relationships and the managers want to create inclusive opportunities and supports for staff, not just efficiencies and profit. Anak's business is one of the few to maintain health and employment benefits, considerations often neglected by businesses cutting corners or worse in the quest to create profits.
We find this common thread in all our partners: they seek to cultivate spiritual vibrancy and human flourishing together. Villageworks is a beautiful picture of this.
Our team here wants to resource and support leaders like Anak, and over the next two years, we’re committed to growing our general operations finances to accomplish that across all our projects in a variety of ways.
And since people are the plan, you, we, are the resource for these leaders. If you are already partnering with us, thank you. If you’d like to partner with us, we welcome you.
