Interview - Ginny Jordan

Ginny Jordan, Devin Hibbard and Torkin Wakefield founded BeadforLife in September 2004. They first met the women rolling beads – refugees from war in Uganda, struggling to feed their families on less than a dollar a day – just five months earlier. They took several hundred necklaces back to North America with them and found people liked the beads – ‘they were pretty’. But they also found ‘a real hunger for the stories of these women’. In November, Oprah magazine ran 200 words on BeadforLife. It was in the Christmas edition and $90,000 worth of sales came through the website in just six weeks. ‘We realized we had an organization that could blossom.’