Our Projects
Microenterprise
In Phrao those born into poverty have remained in poverty. Through training and employment, Warm Heart’s Microenterprise Project helps illiterate, landless women & men build sustainable small businesses.
Microenterprise
The situation: The average per capita income in Phrao is $70 per month and 18,000 people live on less than $.75 a day.
The Warm Heart Philosophy: Warm Heart believes that economic sustainability can be achieved only by people who have learned to help themselves. We support the development of small businesses that also keep local cultural traditions alive.
What Warm Heart does: Warm Heart Microenterprise uses grassroots initiatives to help local artisans and entrepreneurs generate their own sources of income by supplementing local artisan and craft skills with business know-how and access to retail markets. Warm Heart also trains landless women in silk growing, spinning, natural dying, and weaving, and provides high-end retail outlets for their products. Warm Heart artisans are paid retail prices for the product they produce, and then receive 50% of the profits generated by Warm Heart sales overseas. The artisans decide collectively how to spend their profits – on higher salaries, healthcare or business expansion. Warm Heart’s 50% of the profits go back into the Microenterprise Initiative and to fund all of its programs.
