June 18, 2009 | Read Time: 1 minute
On tiny Indonesian islands, traditional textile weaving struggles to compete with the mass market. As women are pressed to produce more fabrics faster, weaving quality suffers.
But with the right incentive, that trend may be shifting.
Threads of Life, a business formed in the late 1990s, works with more than 1,000 women in 36 cooperatives to support the traditional textile craft. The Yayasan Pecinta Budaya Bebali Foundation, formed to support the business, has received nearly $1-million from private donors and government agencies around the world.
Threads of Life had $225,000 in sales in 2008, says the group’s founder and co-director, William Ingram. A third of the money goes back to the weavers, while the rest covers costs like travel and pay to the organization’s 12 staff members.
Producing one fine cloth that retails from $40 to $1,000 can take 18 months to two years, Mr. Ingram says. The pay the weavers get can go far. One woman used the money to build a home, take in relatives, and buy her brother a motorbike to run a taxi service between villages.
“A key accomplishment is that young women are being attracted to this,” Mr. Ingram says. “They want to see it as a viable career.”
Here, two weavers from the Bliran Sina Weavers’ Cooperative of Watublapi village on the island of Flores squeeze tree-root bark to extract red dye.
