Keeping up with our New Year goals: integrating more women to our knitting team

At the end of last year, we started to recruiting knitting moms with the help of TİDER a local NGO member of The Global Foodbanking Network  

TİDER stands for Temel İhtiyaç Derneği and means basic needs society They do an amazing job on the ground with one of their markets near to our workshop helping numerous families in need. They created a support market and a point system allowing the poorest families to go and get basic food and household necessities.

How does it work, well they evaluate the income or the lack of thereof of the family and give them a card with points. The people holding this card can go to this little market and shop using their cards getting what they actually need. The market is stocked with products donated by food companies or purchased with donations made to the NGO.

I love this model as the families go get what they really need instead of receiving a predefined box with stuff they might not need or want to consume.

TİDER's efforts also consist in helping this disadvantaged population to get access to work opportunities. 

Here are some of their accomplishments: almost 80 000 people benefited from the markets, people in need got about 270 000 kg of food supplies and the NGO helped about 100 people finding a job. 

Since November we trained 10 women selected by this NGO and 8 of them are already actively working knitting bebemoss toys. 

This small group from the Maltepe area knits Barry the Elephant.

Today we called in the second group of women interested in knitting our organic toys. 48 mothers showed up to the meeting. After spending about one hour presenting the work and how our system operates and answering the women's questions 28 enrolled in the training we will be starting in the following weeks.

For me it's a huge extra workload as I will go and train them for at least 5 days, but I just love meeting new moms, get to know their stories and difficulties and meet their kiddos. As our knitting community grows it gets enriched by the diversity of experiences and the women in it.

I really hope to develop more collaborations with NGO's to not only touch those most in need but group our actions to provide a more integrated help. 

Have a look inside of this market