Local Co-op Improves Women’s Lives and Makes Great Gifts by Kei Tsuzuki

Local Co-op Improves Women’s Lives and Makes Great Gifts
by Kei Tsuzuki

Hidden away amongst the industrial buildings off South Broadway stands a small warehouse with a great heart. Inside, industrious energy fills the air with music and singing in the background. A turquoise trailer next door is filled with the exuberant energy of infants and toddlers.

This is Southwest Creations Collaborative (SCC), a non-profit organization dedicated to improving the lives of women and their families.

Founded in 1994, SCC began as a community economic development project committed to developing good jobs for women from Albuquerque’s low-income communities.

Using the strength of the women involved, SCC started as a small sewing shop, creating clothes for a national catalog which marketed clothes made by women’s co-ops in India. From the very beginning, supporting the realities of women’s lives, SCC also offered affordable childcare for its members.

Today, we stand as a multifaceted production shop, offering a variety of production skills from your basic cut and sew to more elaborate hand-finishing services such as fabric printing and beading. Twenty-five women are the backbone of the organization, working on contracts from San Francisco to New York City. Our clients include some of the country’s best designers such as Jonathan Adler in New York City to New Mexico’s own textile artist Maude Andrade.

With our production experience, we have no problem sewing thousands of educational puppets for kids each week or stuffing tens of thousands of sachets for a national bath products chain in a month. Whether in assembly or packaging, or cut and sew, our goal is to find more high-volume contracts with potential for yearlong repeat business that can use our skills and production capacity.

Our business is only a part of what makes SCC special. With our mission of providing low-income women in New Mexico with opportunities to increase the dignity in their lives, we also offer support in areas such as parenting skills training, personal development and healthcare (to name a few).

In conjunction with UNM and the Department of Public Health, we have created a monthly preventative and diagnostic health clinic on site. We offer various educational workshops on issues identified by our members as important to their lives such as improving nutrition and combating domestic violence. And we continue to improve our on-site childcare services, charging only 25 cents an hour per child.

Since we opened our doors, we’ve injected over $1 million in wages into the Albuquerque community; provided a caring environment to over 40 children through our childcare services; and enabled nine women and their families to purchase homes.

In the new year, with the help of our local Advisory Committee, comprised of Albuquerque community and business leaders, we’ll be exploring new business ideas in Albuquerque to increase our local presence and reach more women in need.

All this is to say that we have much to celebrate this year with our business and mission. Each December, we open our doors to the community and thank our friends for their support.

Join us on Friday, December 7th from 4 to 7 p.m. when we will light our luminarias, sell fabulous holiday gifts at great prices, and hold our first-ever Silent Auction. In addition, Mujeres en Accion, a fully-certified kitchen cooperative run by women of Albuquerque’s South Broadway neighborhood, will be on hand to sell their fabulous, mouthwatering tamales!

Do your holiday shopping while supporting a great organization that’s making a real difference in Albuquerque!