Benefiting from the many facets of beauty

A jewellery start-up is challenging what Belle TIndall perceives as empowerment and agency.

Belle Tindall

Belle is the staff writer at Seen & Unseen.

Three women stand, two lean into each other sharing a joke, while the other laughs too.

Members of Zena's Launch Pad team, Kamuli, Uganda.

Zena.

I have a conundrum. I’ve started and re-started this article four times now. And I’m surprised that I’ve settled on this opening. But alas, I have a deadline to adhere to and a cold coffee to warm back up. So, this will have to do. I’m struggling with this opening paragraph because when it comes to writing about Zena - the female-led, non-profit, environmentally friendly jewellery and accessory brand - I simply do not know where to begin.

There are too many facets of Zena that deserve to sit front and centre in this article; too many details to revel in, too many stories to tell, too much success to pick at and analyse.

Where do I possibly start?

How about with the delightful fact that the brand is named after a beloved pet goat who makes appearances on their TikTok? You know, kick things off on an endearing note. Or perhaps the fact that there are playlists curated for all occasions, dance challenges, and even a recipe for tequila lollipops on their website? That would certainly alert people to how seriously this team takes the art of having fun. Or maybe I should open with the fact that they’ve both challenged and refined how I perceive empowerment and agency. I could explain how they have alerted me to the importance of investing in female entrepreneurs as a means of tackling extreme poverty and profound gender inequality.

Yes. I think that’s it. Let’s start there and work our way backwards, shall we?

These women are not beneficiaries, they are benefactors – and that’s an important, not to mention beautiful, distinction.

In which case, here’s the heartbeat of Zena, here’s what you need to know in order to understand everything else about them: women living in rural poverty are currently facing two major barriers when it comes to business opportunity and entrepreneurship, and Zena are tackling both head on.

Firstly, female entrepreneurs in these settings have little to no capital with which to launch their business ventures. To combat this, every single product offered by Zena, whose HQ is in Kamuli (Uganda), is hand-crafted by women who were previously living below the poverty line. Through the Zena apprenticeships, these women are able to support themselves and their families while also earning/saving the capital they need to launch their own businesses once the short-term apprenticeship comes to an end. These women are not beneficiaries, they are benefactors – and that’s an important, not to mention beautiful, distinction.

Secondly, as well as a lack of capital, these women are battling a lack of education. And so, through a multi-phase entrepreneurship programme (The Zena Launch Pad), Zena are giving their apprentices both the theoretical and practical tools that they need to launch and sustain their own businesses. Women are graduating from this programme with literacy and numeracy skills, a viable business plan, industry-specific knowledge and skills, as well as leadership and development.

Because here’s the bottom-line, the foundation upon which Zena stands, the deep conviction of both Caragh and Loren, the co-founders and CEOs; agency matters. Widening one’s understanding of success to encompass these women’s agency, for better or for worse, matters. Empowering these women to earn their own capital, to see the unfolding of their own ideas, to know that their decisions matter, it makes all the difference. No dependence, no hand-outs, and no debt. Just the kind of empowerment that is laced with agency.

It’s bold. But it’s working.

There was utter delight in her eyes when she explained how good generates more good and creation generates more creation.

So far, time-stamped at this moment in time, Zena’s hybrid and holistic approach has led to 67 female entrepreneurs, over 150 children in school, and nearly 500 lives lived above the poverty line. Women are hiring other women, businesses are birthing more businesses, education is generating more education.

Pretty special, isn’t it? Pretty Jesus-like too.

I had the immense joy of chatting to Caragh, one of the co-founders and CEOs of Zena; she reminded me that multiplication is one of Jesus’ most classic moves. Just as the people sitting around Jesus with wide eyes and numb backsides witnessed one humble lunch feed tens-of-thousands of mouths, so are Caragh and her team witnessing jaw-dropping multiplication happen before their very eyes. There was utter delight in her eyes when she explained how good generates more good and creation generates more creation. Compassion is contagious and innovation spreads. Although Zena is by no means an enterprise that squeezes itself into a religious box (empowering women of all faiths and none), it is easy to see how Caragh and Loren’s faith in a God who wrote generative goodness into the fabric of reality, informs their mission to write it into their business model.

Something else that is woven into the DNA of Zena, much to my delight, is an unabashed celebration of the female consumer. 2023 may well be remembered as the year when an economic earthquake was caused by Taylor Swift, Beyonce, and Barbie. According to Forbes, it is likely to be regarded as the year where people began to take seriously and analyse the power of 'the female dollar'. And Zena, with their penchant for all things pink and glittery, have been sitting ahead of the curve for a little while. Their products, as seen in Vogue, Marie Claire, and Harvey Nicholls (as well as embellishing the looks of numerous celebrities), seem to have been made with this cultural moment in sight. Their aesthetic perfectly encapsulates the resurgence of female playfulness and the reclaiming of ‘girliness’ as something to embrace and revel in. As I have already referenced, joy is something that this team take incredibly seriously.

The celebration of women infiltrates every layer of Zena’s existence, that much is clear. While their products delight the female gaze, their profits sow into female entrepreneurship. Both of which display how working toward gender equality, particularly in contexts such as Kamuli, is a means by which we can wage a war on extreme poverty.

Women serving women, who are serving women, who are serving women. And on it goes – so beautifully circular. So intriguingly God-inspired.

Snippet

America

Change

Politics

Trauma

7 November 2024

3 min read

How America reckons with its fractured reality

The first thing is always to listen. To sit. To feel.

Jared Stacy

Jared holds a Theological Ethics PhD from the University of Aberdeen. His research focuses conspiracy theory, politics, and evangelicalism.

Two people sit at the table, one dictates as the other types. Behind a banner reads: write a postcard to the next president.i

Artist Sheryl Oring types messages to the president.

instagram/usf_npml

Yesterday, the day after the election, I preached a funeral. I heard the name of our President-elect only once. But I did speak on Jesus and Lazarus. About pain and loss.

I named our enemy, death, that robber, cheat, and swindler. And I spoke about grief—we all grieve in so many different ways. And then about tears. I shared about the man from Nazareth, whose public grief before the tomb of his friend drew hushed whispers from onlookers.

It was, you may remember, a tomb he was about to open. He knew, Jesus did, what he was about to do. And did it so that those who were there would become witnesses to precisely what God is about: defeating death. “Come out, Lazarus!” says Jesus, and he does.

The Christian faith, I told the grieving, would have us believe that even in our grief, there is a hope that hems it in. That Jesus enters our darkness and comes to rob death of its finality. I love too that Jesus says next— “Unbind him!” —turning onlookers into witnesses and participants.

This was how I spent my day. I’m not sure I could have spend it any better. Not because it was an escape from the election, but it forced some perspective on me. Because T.S. Eliot is right: “we cannot bear much reality.”

Here, political autopsies are everywhere. Some talk of the Democrat’s conceit, of denying President Biden’s liability as a candidate, bypassing the primaries, refusing to meet economic concerns. There’s talk of Trump’s genius and what looks to be the end of his legal troubles. There’s talk of the downfall of America, of ascendant and aspiring authoritarianisms. Perhaps. Especially if we take Trump at his word.

But as the funeral ends, I’m weighed down by the messages I’m starting to read. Not about the results alone. Not questions about political strategy and futures. No, these are pained voices from a Christian community in America betraying itself.

My phone messages are filled with stories of pain and loss. Friends and strangers alike, enduring the same loss, the same betrayal. The communities that taught us the faith now distort it. And none of this is new.

Howard Thurman, who mentored Martin Luther King Jr., said it back in 1946: “the tragic truth is that the church permits various hate groups in our common life to establish squatter’s rights in the minds of believers because there has been no adequate teaching on the meaning of the faith in terms of human dignity.” This loss has been with us for generations. But these fissures and fractures are ours to bear today. And they are not unconnected from the social and political chaos of America.

Martin Luther once said, “living, dying, and being damned makes one a theologian.” This has taught me to welcome, rather than despise, accusations that question the validity of my faith. It’s also made me suspicious of the misplaced messianic hope from which such questions emerge. It’s a false hope not easily displaced.

Before I returned to the States from living in Scotland these last few years, a good friend told me honestly: “perhaps America will have to ride it out, all of it, until it’s done.” The thought seemed a far-off scenario then. But I think he’s right.

When Israel built the golden calf in the wilderness, Moses made them grind it up into powder, mixing it in their drinks. The Christian community in America, whether we realize it our not, will soon be drinking our idolatry down to the dregs with consequences beyond Christian community itself.

And people ask, “what should we do?” And I think that time is near for that question. But the first thing is always to listen. To sit. To feel. And to remember that it’s not for nothing that Jesus, who pronounced so many woes over Jerusalem, also wept over it.

This article’s image is of Sheryl Oring, an artist who invites the public to write to the next president. She has typed and sent thousands of messages to the White House every election since 2004 as part of her performance series I Wish to Say. Read more about her and the letters: Artist Invites the Public to Write Letters to the Next US President