Issue: Spring 2016 | Posted: April 25, 2016
Ministry in the Marketplace
Union Graduates Use Creative Businesses to Help People at Home and Abroad
By Nathan Handley ('15)
Jewelry for Refugees
Ran, a Nepali refugee, assembles a necklace for Ekata Designs.
Sarah Brubaker’s jewelry designs line the walls of her workspace. A curtain separates work space from storage space, and round paper lanterns hang from the ceiling. But the painted cinder block walls and fluorescent lights reveal that this was originally a classroom. The logo for Sarah’s business, Ekata Designs, is drawn on the old chalkboard.
Sarah sits at a table, managing orders on a laptop. At the other end of the table sits Ran, a Nepali refugee, assembling a necklace.
This is the headquarters for Ekata Designs, a jewelry business that was launched in 2011. It is nestled in a back room at First Baptist Church in Memphis. Sarah has been a part of the business almost since its inception. She says Ekata exists to provide employment to refugees, mostly women, who are new to Memphis.
The name was chosen to give the women a sense of community and belonging. It is derived from the Nepali word for unity.
“Typically, when refugees come to America, they’ve been in crazy situations up to this point,” Sarah says.
Many of the women Sarah has worked with over the past four years have spent around 10-20 years in refugee camps, and this is their first job on the path to a new profession. After spending years in these camps unable to work, they come to the United States and are immediately confronted by a society that depends heavily on employment and self-betterment.
“To transition to this is really complicated,” Sarah says. “And then you add on that their training and skills don’t usually match up with what America is looking for, or if they do match up it’s hard to prove that they have the training or skills.”
Sarah says the shift hits women the hardest. She says women from these countries are usually less likely to have the same level of education and speak English as well as men. Ekata was born out of a desire to help these specific women.
Amal, a Somalian refugee, got her first job in the United States putting together jewelry at Ekata Designs.
Amal, a Somalian refugee, is one of the women working for Ekata. She has never had a permanent home. The last time she saw her family together was 1999. Until 2007, she lived with her grandmother in Somalia. When her grandmother died, she went to live with her aunt and uncle in Uganda.
In 2013, they came to America. Amal was supposed to go to . All of her paperwork had said that was her destination, but when she went to the International Organization for Migration, they said she was going to Memphis. She landed in Memphis in August of that year.
Ekata is one of two jobs Amal has. She says it gives her a place to work for herself and gain valuable experience, and the skills she has learned have been precious to her.
“I never made orders before, or worked with a computer or made any kind of jewelry,” she says. “It makes me feel comfortable and happy working here. I love it actually.”
Amal has learned to use a computer and iPad, and she says those tools have helped her at home and at her other job. When her other boss explains things to her, she can understand better using the computer.
Sarah graduated from Union University
in 2011 with a degree in social work.
While a student at Union, she began
working with refugees through an
internship, and that was when Ekata
was started.
Sarah says she loved working with refugees: “I just loved getting to meet a practical need and in the midst of that build relationships, so I asked if I could stick around and continue to run this business.”
Sarah says she never imagined herself designing jewelry or running a business, but she has always loved making things. She has a specific memory from the only art class she took while at Union.
"I remember Mr. (Lee) Benson saying, ‘You can make art and change the world too.’ It’s been funny to see how much that has come true. I get to use the skills that I learned in social work, but I also get to use my love of designing and creating that I’ve had my whole life.”
Working at Ekata has given Amal a chance at employment in America. It has given her valuable skills and experience, but it has also given her and her family much needed extra income.
Some of the money she earns helps her and her husband buy what they need, but the majority goes overseas to her family in an Ethiopian refugee camp. Seven of her eight siblings live at that camp, along with her parents, two nieces and a nephew.
“I wake up every morning and go to work not only for myself, but to help my family have a better life,” Amal says. “I give money to my family that is still in a refugee camp so they can put food on their table and get an education. Those are the most important things.”
For Sarah, the commercial aspect of Ekata was almost an afterthought. Her passion is helping refugees, not building a thriving business model. But the business is integral to the mission. For the first couple of years, she raised support to keep the business going and allow the women to keep working, but she knew the business had to be self-sustaining if it were going to last. She said that is one reason the team chose to make jewelry in the first place.
“Jewelry was what we settled on, one, because people will continue to buy jewelry,” Sarah says. “Women love jewelry. They love to accessorize, feel beautiful and have conversation starters. You don’t buy one piece of jewelry and you’re done, just like you don’t buy one shirt and you’re done.”
On top of the repeat business, Sarah says making jewelry is a skill she can teach easily and that people can learn to do well. Sarah wants Ekata to be a business people buy from because they like the product, not because they feel pity.
“We’ve said from the beginning we want this to provide employment and training, but I don’t ever want someone to buy our jewelry because they feel sorry for us or because, ‘Oh, poor refugees,’” Sarah says.
“I want them to look at the jewelry and think that the quality is incredible, the price is fair, and it’s beautiful. And then when they hear on top of that that it’s made by a refugee they’re like, ‘That’s awesome. I’m also getting to support a good cause.’”
Because of this, Ekata’s jewelry style has changed a lot over the four years it has been open. Sarah says in the beginning, there was little structure.
“It was just kind of, ‘Here are the basic designs. Make what you want. We’ll see how it goes.’”
Over time, the team has refined the design process, trying to navigate between what they like and what their customers will want.
Sarah says it has been fun to see the response to the way the design has developed. Stores have started contacting her, asking if they can carry her product, and sales through markets and online stores are increasing every year.
“People that have walked beside us the whole time keep telling us every year that our jewelry is getting better and better,” Sarah says.
Amal says her life is improving. In 2015, she met and married her husband. In 2016, they are expecting their first child. She is settling into her life in Memphis, and she says there is no way she could have gotten where she is on her own.
She says she wants people to always remember that refugees need a lot of help.
“A refugee is someone who has moved from their country to another,” Amal says. “So they don’t have a home, shelter, anything at all. They left their country because of war and a lot of stuff. They need help, whoever they are. You can help them.”
“There were a million struggles getting Ekata to this point,” Sarah says.
She says the first and most pronounced challenge was that she has no business background whatsoever.
“I picked up making jewelry pretty well, but the business aspect is something that’s a lot more challenging to me. In the circles I run in, the majority of my friends and community are much more artistic with those type of passions or orientation, and I’m asking, ‘Does anybody know how to do QuickBooks, like, anybody at all?’”
Sarah says almost everything she has learned has been trial and error. She says sometimes that works fine, but she got to the point where she needed a business adviser.
“I somewhat joke and I’m somewhat serious when I tell people that about two or three times every year, I try to quit the job,” Sarah says.
She says there are so many things she doesn’t know how to do, and it can be overwhelming. During one period of transition at Ekata, Sarah said she had to make a decision about whether she would continue with the business or quit. She was praying that God would show her his will when she went to a meeting at a coffee shop near the church.
“I was saying, ‘I will continue to do this, but I need to know that this is actually what you’re calling me to. Because if I’m just doing this for me, then we’re done. This is too hard to do by myself.’”
Sarah pulled into the parking lot of the coffee shop, and there were pieces of paper scattered all over the ground.
“There’s like a couple hundred pieces, and I pick up one piece randomly,” she says.
She still has the piece of paper she picked up. It’s a page torn from a Bible concordance. At the top of the page, indicating the first and last words referenced, are the words “Jesus’ – Jewelry.”
Sarah says she took this as
confirmation that she was right where
she needed to be. She says the more
she thinks about it, the stranger that
occurrence seems.
“It’s really hysterical because if whoever wrote this had made the font one size bigger, or if I had picked up any other piece of paper, it wouldn’t quite have had the same effect,” she says.
Since that time, Sarah has found a business adviser to guide her and train her. The struggles continue, but she says it is never too much, and the work is always rewarding in the end. Sarah hopes to add another full-time position next year—she usually employs two or three women at a time—and she is slowly learning the Nepali language to better communicate with the women who work with her.
“I said this at the beginning, I didn’t start Ekata because I wanted to make money and have a business,” Sarah says. “I started Ekata because I care. I care about the women and want to provide for them, and I follow Jesus and he says love your neighbor. If you’re supposed to love your neighbor, this seems like a great way to do that.”
Watches for education
Matt Nason, a 2004 Union graduate, runs his business from the back room of his house in downtown Memphis. He is one of the owners of Generation Watches, a company he created with his brother, Jonathan, during a conversation over a Thanksgiving holiday.
Matt and Jonathan were both familiar with Educate BV, a Christian ministry that provides education for impoverished children in Buena Vista, Guatemala, and they wanted to find a way to provide sustainable, year-round funding for the program.
“We decided we could create a business where we can give some of our profits to them,” Matt says.
The brothers looked at TOMs and businesses with similar models and discussed several products for their company to sell. They finally settled on watches.
Matt Nason, owner of Generation Watches, changes the band on one of the watches he and his brother designed.
“Our slogan is ‘Giving the next generation their time back,’” Matt says. “What’s the one thing everybody says you can’t buy? You can buy anything but time. But what if you could? What if you could buy time for somebody else? Would you?”
Matt and Jonathan believed people would. In August 2014, they launched Generation Watches as a funding partner for Educate BV.
Matt says most of the problems in Guatemala can be tied to a lack of education. Not just math, science and reading, but health and social education as well. Giving children education gives them a chance at better, longer lives.
Last year, Generation Watches added the Memphis Teacher Residency program (a Union University partner) as a second partner. The four-year program lets teachers receive master’s degrees in urban education and teach three years in a Memphis city school.
Matt says it only made sense to add a local partner.
“We give 50 percent of our profits away,” he says. “And none of the owners takes a salary.”
Matt now runs the business fulltime from his home office. He and Jonathan design their own watches. They come up with the dimensions and specifications and send them to a manufacturer.
Matt and his wife, Tiffany, also a Union graduate, have six kids, five of whom are under 4. Just last year, they adopted triplets. Matt says he spends most of his time taking care of the kids, so he ends up working at night and on days when they go to preschool.
When he can work on the business, Matt spends his time handling social media, taking orders, packaging and shipping watches, and doing paperwork.
“Sometimes I get a few minutes in during the day,” Matt says. “Whenever I can slip away.”
Generation Watches was envisioned as a ministry before it was a business. Matt says he wants it to stay that way.
“This has never been about us making money,” he says. “It’s all about giving back.”
