Make a Difference by Shopping with your Friends

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You can help the children Fresh and Green Academy when you shop!

There are 3 ways that benefit the Academy directly, including for the first time, the opportunity to buy crafts from the Mothers’ Cooperative!

Fresh & Green is on Etsy!

Store MontageYou can now buy some of the beautiful all-cotton scarves that are hand-woven by the mothers of some of the students at the Mothers’ Coetsyoperative.  We have a small selection of stylish and traditional dresses as well, and hope soon to bring you some of the beautiful pottery, baskets, sandals and wickerwork that these ladies produce as part of their initiative to retrain and work to feed their families.

100% of the net proceeds go straight back to Fresh and Green Academy. Click below.

 

Goodshop is a great way to help the children of Fresh and Green while you shop at some of the most popular stores in North America!

Through the generosity of brands like American Eagle Outfitters, Barnes & Noble, Forever 21 and MANY others, simply buying what you normally shop for will send a percentage of the sale to the school! If a new customer, you can join here, and when you specify a cause, pick Friends of Fresh and Green Academy (NY). If you’ve already shopped through Goodshop, Follow the How it Works link at the top of the page and pick “Support a Cause.”

Goodshop will send 2%, 3%, even 5% of the purchase to Friends of Fresh goodshoplogoxparentand Green and 100% of that goes to the school.

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Amazon Smile helps you, help us, make a difference in a child’s life!

Did you know you can find just about anything on Amazon.com? Did you also know that they are generous in supporting charities throughout the country by donating a portion of the sale to a charity of the customer’s choice?

The program is called Amazon Smile and if you specify Friends of Fresh and Green Academy as
your camazonsmilewhiteharity of choice, we automatically receive a percentage of the sale.

Use our special Amazon Smile link and Amazon.com will make a donation on every purchase you make. You can even use your Prime account!

Shop the Mothers Cooperative and Feed a Family.

Shop the Mothers Cooperative and Feed a Family.

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The Fresh and Green Mothers Cooperative has been expanding and the quality of their items is top notch!

Eighty-one women in the neighborhood of Kotebe in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, have changed their lives by joining the Mothers Cooperative. The women not only create beautiful hand made items at Fresh and Green Academy’s onsite crafting area, help cook the meals for the children and help out at the school, but they have established true friendships and help each other through the tough times.

The women of the cooperative used to spend their days begging and prostituting themselves just to eat and feed their families, but now, thanks to your purchases and donations, they have hope for the future and have become empowered beyond belief.

The scarfs made by the women are available now through our Etsy page! 

Order before December 19th and have a beautiful scarf in time for Christmas!

Fair Trade Tuesday Brings Hope To Our Mothers!

Fair Trade Tuesday Brings Hope To Our Mothers!

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Help the mothers of Fresh and Green by buying an item made at the school!

Shop our online store here!

The students’ mothers come to Fresh and Green Academy at least once per week to work in the Mothers Cooperative. You’ll find them working in the newly created looming area weaving colorful scarfs. They can weave four scarfs in a day, knowing every item sold helps them provide food for their families.

You might imagine the moms to be in their late thirties with their solemn, lined faces talking softly among themselves. Looks can be deceiving: most are in their twenties and early 30s, which is middle-aged in Ethiopia. Life expectancy is only 45.Sit and talk with them and you’ll learn some of their stories: most grew up in small villages. In the 1980s, when most of them were children, it was a time of

You might imagine the moms to be in their late thirties with their solemn, lined faces talking softly among themselves. Looks can be deceiving: most are in their twenties and early 30s, which is middle-aged in Ethiopia. Life expectancy is only 45.Sit and talk with them and you’ll learn some of their stories: most grew up in small villages. In the 1980s, when most of them were children, it was a time of

Sit and talk with them and you’ll learn some of their stories: most grew up in small villages. In the 1980s, when most of them were children, it was a time of great famine in Ethiopia. And so they moved to Addis Ababa as soon as they got into their teens, thinking it would be the land of opportunity. But there was no work, or food to be found. Some of them turned to prostitution as the only way of staying alive. Most got pregnant, and most got HIV.

That is one common thread that runs through their lives. But the other commonality is this: Through Fresh and Green they have been given back their dignity: through the weaving and craft sales, they are able to afford food for themselves and their children. Most importantly, the meals they are now able to afford help them qualify for the life-saving anti-retroviral medicine that has turned AIDS from a fatal to a manageable disease.

Muday has held classes in health and hygiene and they have learned how to keep themselves and their families healthy and strong. They have formed a sisterhood of trust and friendship in a city where life can be very unforgiving; in short, they are thriving.

Through Muday’s vision, the entire neighborhood of Kotebe has been transformed. With your help, not just the students, but their mothers have been given this one invaluable thing called hope.