Venture gives migrants who have escaped violence gain new purpose
You can’t see their battle scars, but some of the women working at a sustainable store in Auckland are survivors.
Jyoti (not her real name), a trainee in her 20s, said her “Prince Charming” husband turned into a monster 15 days into their arranged marriage. He beat her up and locked her in a room for days.
She still has soft-tissue injuries from that battering.
Jyoti is one of dozens of women who have gone through a 20-week training programme at Sustinnoworx, a social enterprise in Henderson, West Auckland that is helping women who have come out of abusive relationships become financially independent.
Eco-friendly beauty and household products sit to the left, racks of colourful secondhand clothing in the middle, and dotted around the store are spots of colour from spice packets to perfumed candles, earrings and pre-loved homeware.
Once, Jyoti’s husband beat her so badly she lost their unborn baby. He knew she was pregnant, but hit her anyway.
Bleeding in hospital, she told a social worker about the beatings, but her husband found out and accused her of ratting on him. She was sent home, and the violence continued.
Things came to a head when the neighbours intervened one day. They had heard her cries for help and called the police, who brought Jyoti to a women’s refuge.
The refuge was a foreign place and she was fearful at first, but time helped. For the first time in months “I felt safe, and happy”, she said.
Not that long ago, Jyoti hardly spoke English. She had learned the language in school back home, but had never spoken it. A new migrant in New Zealand, she had no friends, knew little about the country, its systems and cultures. Her husband held the money, her passport and visa.
“I had to ask for money, for permission to go out,” she said, “Now I have a bank account. I can take the bus, go anywhere.”
At first, she needed encouragement and gentle shoves from trainers to approach customers.
“But now I go up and ask, can I help you? What do you like?”
Jyoti walks to the sewing workshop at the back of the store. This is where the women do clothing alterations and upcycling — turning old clothing and fabric like old saris otherwise headed to landfill into wraparound skirts, bags, or face masks.
More important than reinventing unwanted fast fashion into new items is the transformation that’s happening on the human front.
They started out as fearful migrant women reeling from the trauma of family violence and abuse, silenced by formidable language, cultural and information barriers. The difference when they come out of the training programme is “massive”, Sustinnoworx co-ordinator Pauline Agache says.
The first Sustinnoworx store opened in 2018, the brainchild of a group of women, including Agache, passionate about the environment.
Their immediate goal is to stay afloat to continue to provide a training ground, offer jobs and a living wage to the most vulnerable women in the community. Most of the programme’s first batch of graduates have found work in the New Zealand job market, Agache says.
Their other focus is tackling fast fashion. Millions of women in developing countries like Bangladesh and India — home countries of some of the trainees — work in conditions akin to modern slavery to produce the cheap clothing that women in New Zealand then buy with their hard-earned money, she says.
“Fast fashion is not helping women at all. It’s use quick, throw fast, and buy more, and it’s terrible for the environment. So much of it ends up in landfill, and continues to pollute the environment because it doesn’t break down easily,” Agache says.
Textile waste and fast fashion are complex global supply chain problems that the slow fashion on offer at the store doesn’t have all the answers to, but the social enterprise is hoping to raise awareness and change mindsets, starting with their trainees and customers.
“We can choose to do nothing about it, or we start making change that will make a difference for future generations,” Agache says.
Jyoti cannot imagine going back to life in her home country as a once-married woman separated from her husband.
“There is too much shame, and too many questions,” she says.
She sorts secondhand clothing and shares a laugh with a fellow trainee. She had no friends in her old life under her abusive husband’s roof, but today has found support, friendship, and ambition.
She’s looking for work, and she has a dream.
“I want to be a police officer, to help other women like me.”