Women Who Rule

Blue Marble Ice Cream shop co-owners Jennie Dundas and Alexis Miesen (photo: bluemarbleicecream.com)

Check out these three super-cool charitable non-profits run by smart women who help empower other smart women:

The Tia Foundation: Dedicated to providing health care strategies (not relief) for residents of rural Mexico. What makes Tia (“aunt” in Spanish) different from other NGOs is that it’s more of a support system. Its founder, Laura Libman, doesn’t believe in creating dependency on an outside source. She practices the “teach a woman to fish” rather than the “give a woman a fish” model. Tia trains women to be medical workers, and promotes sustainable health care. Bueno.

Safe Passage: Guatemala City’s landfill is one of Central America’s largest and most toxic. It houses more than one-third of the nation’s waste including medical syringes, leaking bio-hazardous tanks, and even human and animal corpses. Sadly, a reported 30,000 people live along the dump’s perimeter, salvaging it every day for food and shelter. And a staggering 40 percent of these squatters are single-parent families headed by women. Safe Passage provides free education to children of the men and women who scavenge the landfill. Its programs are designed to raise the self-esteem of these kids by teaching them life skills: work, self-sufficiency, and leadership. Now in its 11th year, Safe Passage serves more than 550 children from two to 19 years old. The goal? To prove that families have the power to raise themselves out of poverty.

Blue Marble Dreams: Ice cream is changing Africa. Last year, Jennie Dundas and Alexis Miesen, co-owners of Brooklyn, New York’s organic Blue Marble Ice Cream shop, were asked to open another location – in Rwanda. They were skeptical at first, knowing that the nation desperately needs more vital necessities (clean water, for one). But after hearing about the dismal plight of many Rwandan women, they knew they had to do something. Odile Gakire Katese (a.k.a. Kiki), the Rwandan woman who proposed the idea said, “Because we struggle most of the time, we find ourselves aggressive toward happiness, love, joy, life. When we have children, we teach them that happiness doesn’t exist. Now we want to reshape life in its simplest and sweetest form.” Not only will Blue Marble Dreams create sustainable employment for local women and enable them to support their families, it’ll also make a lot of little kids happy.