Stitching dignity
through self-reliance
Around the world, capable people stay trapped in poverty for lack of the tools to earn a living. A single sewing machine can change that.
Sew Much Hope refurbishes donated sewing machines and places them with refugees here in the United States and with families in communities overseas that war, genocide or poverty have knocked flat.
A machine is a trade. It is a way to clothe a family, sell at a market, and stop waiting on someone else. We would rather hand someone that than a box of used clothes.
How it started
Gino Rich bought his first sewing machine at a fire sale in an antique shop. An old treadle, $7.50. He put a few dollars of parts into it and had about twenty in it altogether, and that is the machine he has sewn on ever since. Forty years later it is still in his shop.
He was around thirty when he met his biological father for the first time. His father noticed the watch chain he was wearing and asked where he got it. Gino said he had made it. So had his father, on a treadle, by hand.
Not long after, the back page of the Church News ran a short piece about a senior missionary couple serving in the Philippines. The wife had brought a sewing machine with her and told the women in their small branch they were welcome to use it. One woman sewed on it nearly every day. What nobody realized was that she was not spending what she earned, she was saving it, and by the end of that mission she had put away enough to take her whole family to the temple. That trip can run a week or two each way. Families there sometimes sell everything they own to make it once.
Gino read that and thought, I could have given her that machine.
So he started buying old machines, fixing them up and giving them away. For five years they went out through a church humanitarian center in Salt Lake City on one condition: they had to go somewhere else. They were manual machines that needed no electricity, and the places that needed them were not in Utah. After that he partnered with other nonprofits and the machines went further. In Ecuador his sewing class was thirty women and one man, with half the children in the village watching. In Ethiopia it was thirty men and three women, in an area where the average income was about twenty-five dollars a year.
“I didn’t go, but my machines did.”
That is how it ran for twenty-five years. One man, a few dozen machines a year, no organization behind any of it. Then a lawyer asked him why he wasn’t a nonprofit. Gino said he wouldn’t know how to do that. The lawyer said he was a lawyer, and set it up.
There is a board now, and volunteers, and partners who ask for machines fifty and a hundred at a time. What happens at the bench has not changed. One machine, cleaned up and put right, handed to one family who will put it to work.
The problem
Millions of refugees and families in poverty have the willingness and the ability to work, and no way to start. Sewing is a skill many of them already have. Without a machine it earns nothing.
A used machine sitting in a closet in Utah can close that gap for one family. The training that comes with it keeps paying out for years.
What we do
We collect, repair and refurbish quality sewing machines, electric and hand crank, and send them where they will do the most good.
Collect and refurbish
Donated and pawnshop machines are cleaned, repaired and tested in Utah by volunteers. Many are converted to hand crank for places without power.
Travel with partners
We are a tag-along nonprofit. Machines ride in carry-on bags with organizations already going, so nearly every dollar buys machines rather than freight.
Start with a school
We would rather place ten machines in a sewing school than a hundred in closets. Students learn to sew, to maintain the machine, and to teach the next class.
The right machine for the place
Much of the world sews without a wall outlet, so we choose each machine for where it is going.
- Hand crank where there is no electricity
- Electric where the power is steady
- Dual-function machines where power comes and goes
- Bought locally when we can, so we support the tailors and shops already there instead of undercutting them
- Sent with fabric, thread and spare parts whenever a partner has room
What a sewing machine does
A donated machine is more than equipment. It is a family’s means to make clothing, start a small business, and provide for themselves with dignity. Some of what our machines have made so far:
- Clothing a family would otherwise have to buy
- School uniforms and hygiene kits
- Dolls and bears for Yazidi orphans, sewn by refugee women in Greece
- Napkins under contract for a hotel in the Peruvian Andes
- The skirts these students in Zambia are wearing
- Goods a mother of four in Haiti sells through her children at the market
Changing lives, changing communities
Over 41 years, the machines add up. These are the counts we can stand behind.
Every machine has a story
Every machine that reaches us has been somewhere. One of them arrived with its history written out. It belonged to Lily Elizabeth Smith, born in England in 1895, the fourth of eight daughters raised by a widowed mother after their father died. She never got to go to school. When she married, she and her husband saved and bought a sewing machine, and she used it to clothe her family and earn a little on the side.
Her daughter crossed the Atlantic as a war bride in 1945. Lily and her husband followed, and the machine came with them. It kept working, and it stayed in the family until the family handed it to us.
Most machines show up without a page like that. They still have one. So does the family who gets it next.
“Merci anpil. May God bless you.”
Madame Manise, a mother of four in Haiti, the afternoon a hand-crank machine and a lap tray arrived at her home. She had lost both legs in a car accident and believed her working life was over. Now she sews goods her older children sell at the market.