Genre:
From Loss to Legacy: How a Fashion Business Rose From Haiti’s Rubble
By Julie Colombino-Billingham
Inspired to help Haiti recover from the devastating earthquake of 2010, aid worker Julie Colombino-Billingham flew there intending to say for a few weeks and remained for years. Falling in love with the Haitian people, she soon realized their deepest need was for a long-term solution to the widespread poverty and lack of opportunity they faced. Slowly, by trial and error, she and her determined team of fellow volunteers and native Haitians built Deux Mains, a fair-trade fashion brand that came from nothing and is now a thriving employee-owned and -operated global business. The United Nations, Kenneth Cole, Eileen Fisher, USAID, and the Clinton Foundation are a few of the many business partners Colombino-Billingham has cultivated over the years.
Colombino-Billingham’s revolutionary approach to disaster aid provides a successful model for ending poverty, supporting education, and empowering people to succeed. This riveting memoir tells the story of her years in Haiti, and of the beauty, generosity, and strength she found there.
Book Details
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"The survivors of this tragedy were already painfully aware of how this story would play out, just as it had every time there was a natural disaster in their country. Foreign workers would fly in and follow protocol by giving away rice, water, and tents, not understanding the long-term effects of giving without having a sustainability plan."
"I realized we were inching closer to a destiny I’d always believed in: a factory and fashion brand in Haiti, proving to the world that beauty and strength could rise from the ashes the earthquake left behind." -
Resilience after disaster
Humanitarianism and service
Entrepreneurship with purpose
Hope and rebuilding
Poverty and global inequality -
“In telling her own story, Julie Colombino-Billingham tells the story of so many whose lives were transformed by the 2010 earthquake in Haiti. Her clear and honest recollections put the reader at the epicenter of the most challenged and resilient culture in the western hemisphere.” -Sean Penn