About the author
Cara Boccieri moved to Thailand 10 years ago to do a participatory research. She has a Masters in International Peace and Conflict Resolution, so she always focused on working with people affected by conflict immigration. Now, she supervises a team of refugees there with fashion brand Ways of Change, and tours in the Netherlands to present her work and make WoC grow.
Ways of Change (WoC) already worked in textile, mostly in bags and jewelry that the women weave. She now wants to work with a designer. “If I have a project I can go out and say “hey, who wants to work with me?”, one or a few women and I will work closely to make that first sample. If we make more, she manages that.” Everything is locally-sourced and recycled.
Acting for a positive change
She found what she was looking for in India in 2009. “I’ve been living in the US feeling that my values don’t align with where I grew up. Whistle working with refugees, I found people who had taken their lives into action in order to find a peaceful place, a loving life, and a positive change.”
I’m a planner so I said that it might take a long time, and you find that, in the refugee context, there’s no planning, no tomorrow.
A positive change, that’s what she acts for: “Creating a space where the values these people have can be cultivated and potentially shared with the world. WoC wasn’t my idea. It’s a co-creation.” A long path began. “I was just with my backpack, calling people, and I found this Mea Hong Son community, on the Burma border. I’m a planner so I said that it might take a long time, but in the refugee context, there’s no planning, no tomorrow. We sold things on a website after 3 months of working together. But that was because of us combined.”
Valuing ourselves
“WoC also does business training as well as projects that are identified and managed by the community, I’m simply supporting. I don’t know what’s best for them so we made co-creative workshops to talk about their needs. WoC was built on that, not my outside perspective.” The projects are only successful because of that model. “I hope that we will grow to other region of the world, and be that same model: creating together in this space where we’re connected as humans.”
If we really valued every person as a human, we wouldn’t be calling it a refugee crisis, but say “awesome people are coming to work here.”.
“A lot of the work is about valuing our lives, skills, and experiences. When I first began working with this people, they didn’t see themselves as valuable.” She regrets the negative language used to talk about the actual situation. ”If we really valued every person as a human, we wouldn’t be calling it a refugee crisis, but say ‘awesome people are coming to work here.’” She values the work and the human behind the product. “It’s through that relationship of valuing each other that they can come to me with ideas and needs.”
She decided to tour in the Netherlands this summer after the documentary of “Floortje Naar Het Einde Van De Wereld” to work with social enterprises doing value-based work. She hosts workshops about what does valuing and connecting to a human is like. “As we talk about human connection, people say “I want it to be a part of my life, and it’s not here,” so it’s an emotional and creative space. I ask people to forget any ideas and rules and create what the world could look like.” She still tours looking after workshops, sitting with the refugee organizations and meeting with shops to sell WoC products. One month left to go!
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