Will You Be Bringing Any Cow’s? First Day with Hope House 1

We travelled by bus to Ampilantharai, about 40 mins direct from Kallady bridge to meet the management staff of Hope House. Hope House, running for over two years, is a women’s empowerment community project run by Ocean Stars Trust. Ampilantharai was heavily affected by the civil war, leaving many widowed women in the community. The vision of Hope House has been to empower women in the community to learn new, employable skills such as IT and sewing, to in turn boost local employment and business activity. To date, 54 women have completed the sewing training, with many now in employment.

Our work with Hope House focuses on generating income for the centre with the aim to make the centre financially sustainable in the long-term. This, I know, is an ambitious task, but we are working with the management team to think of new income generating ideas and to test them over the coming months. It is only through testing ideas, that you can understand ‘what works’. Zeddy and I are using elements of the Balloon business curriculum that we are familiar with when we worked with entrepreneurs in Kenya.

We encouraged the staff to really focus on having a business mindset and to think of ways in which Hope House could make money. Firstly, using the ‘Cow Challenge’ as an activity to ‘think outside the box’, by thinking of how many ways can you make money from a cow. We could see the management team have many ideas for the centre and seemed to just want some encouragement. There was a slight miscommunication though, as the team momentarily thought we were donating them some cows! This is not happening.

Zeddy also worked through a SWOT analysis, discussing the strengths, weaknesses, threats and opportunities for the Hope House business. It was certainly a new way of thinking for the management team, and they were quite adamant about the unique potential of the centre, located between two schools with very few shops and businesses nearby.

After discussing ideas, the staff really liked the idea of pillow cases. Zeddy made a prototype, and we have agreed to make a set of pillow cases next Monday to sell.

We will be using scrap material from tailor shops as the pillow stuffing which is very cheap and sustainable. We will see how it goes on Monday, what is for sure is that we left Hope House 1 feeling incredibly encouraged by the motivation and enthusiasm from the management team and are excited by what we can achieve.