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- Artisan Profiles-

Mai Vietnamese Handicrafts

Mai Vietnamese Handicrafts is a nonprofit organization that provides income generation and marketing services to Vietnamese artisans.

Mai Handicrafts runs several craft production projects and markets the work of numerous other craft producers. During recent years, Mai Handicrafts has established itself as the primary marketing agent for artisans from neglected families and for women. It practices a model of social development in which social service cannot be separated from economic self-reliance. Mai Handicrafts sales fund various community development activities, including clean water projects, vocational training equipment purchase and teacher wage subsidies. Mai Handicrafts artisans receive social and health insurance, and can apply for scholarship funds. 

Some of the proceeds from handicrafts sales continue to fund the program for street children out of which Mai Vietnamese Handicrafts originated. The organization originally worked with children who could not go to school due to lack of legal papers and inability to pay tuition. Mai Handicrafts provided informal literacy classes.

Global Gifts, through Ten Thousand Villages, purchases dolls, nativities, baskets, coiled bamboo items, lacquerware, wooden frogs, ceramics, purses, table runners, placemats, napkins, and cushions from Mai Vietnamese Handcrafts. Ten Thousand Villages has purchased products from Mai Handicrafts since 1994.

  • Mai Vietnamese Handicrafts was founded in 1991.

  • Mai Handicrafts works with 1,669 artisans in 26 workshops.

  • Artisans working with Mai Handicrafts are 90 percent female, 10 percent male.

  • Organizational margin of Mai Handicrafts goes into social programs for artisans.

  • Community development projects are chosen based on a groups’ needs.

  • Mai Handicrafts collects waste material for recycling; some is utilized in the creation of new products.

  • Mai Handicrafts looks for ways to employ as many people as possible, including in the production of their packing boxes.

  • Global Gifts currently carries a number of products from Mai Vietnamese Handicrafts.

 

  

Salad Tray Set.

For that "hard-to-gift" friend or co-worker, how about a hand-lacquered river stone paperweight commemorating the Year of the Tiger.

Mai Vietnamese Handicrafts.

Mai Vietnamese Handicrafts helps artisans create economic self reliance.

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