Remembering Rana Plaza - 5th Anniversary
As most of you know following the Rana Plaza disaster FIVE years ago, we supported some of the orphans and helped to finance their education.
In honour of all those affected, we have re-launched the Laura Siegel designed scarfs made entirely by hand by the Vankar family in India, with all proceeds going to The Sreepur Village, Bangladesh.
In 2016, Laura Siegel told Vogue “I think the more you get people talking about this, the more likely you are to find a solution. That’s the hardest part. When something like this happens, you want to feel like there’s a solution so it won’t happen again. But in this case, it’s hard to figure out what those solutions might be.”
The Sreepur Village, a UK-based charity, runs and funds a rural village in Bangladesh to empower 200 mothers and educate more than 500 children, along with providing food, healthcare, shelter and a safe place to call home.
For the two years that followed The Rana Plaza collapse, The Sreepur Village supported the education of the many orphaned children until alternative help and money became available. Although our support for this project has now come to an end we will always fight against the injustice of poverty and the exploitative working practices in Bangladesh that trap so many women and children in dire poverty. We believe every child has the right to an education and every mother has the right to work in a safe and secure environment receiving a fair wage for her work.
At the Sreepur Village we work with ethical employers that pay our mothers a living wage, we are also proud to sell our own fair trade products that provide a livelihood for the women at Sreepur and the surrounding villages.
The number of those affected by Rana Plaza has, over the five years, continued to rise and in order to raise awareness on garment industry issues in Bangladesh, Laura Siegel and The Sreepur Village are delighted to mark this fifth anniversary with a collection of scarves that not only highlight the ethnicity of its producers but also help to raise awareness for the fashion industry by revolutionising the way our clothes are sourced, produced and purchased.
Each of the Laura Siegel scarves is made from silk, cotton and upcycled saree, handcrafted by the Vankar family in India. For every purchase made the proceeds will go towards empowering the women of The Sreepur Village and bringing change to the fashion industry.
