Alumna Shares that Each Sandal Has a Story
From the cubicle of her first full-time job, Liz Forkin Bohannon printed out a plane ticket to Uganda and started the journey of following her dream.
Today, her project, Sseko Designs creates sandals that be tied in almost a dozen ways. Just like the sandal’s ribbon straps, the story that led to Sseko’s creation is no straight line.
“Stories that are hard are stories that will stretch you. I studied corporate social responsibility and throughout college become increasingly interested in social justice,” Bohannon says. “And I was compelled to understand the dynamic between people who have power have a voice and those that don’t have either.”
So in that moment in her cubicle she decided to meet up with a friend who was living in Uganda. Before she left, she confesses that her mother hid her passport in a cookie jar. When she arrived in eastern Africa she observed the lack of opportunity for women to continue their education through university studies. So she started to brainstorm scholarship/sponsorship ideas.
“University can cost $2000 to $5000 a year and the average wage is $700,” she says. “Smart high potential women want a job, they want to work. When a woman can create, she has a voice—she has dignity.”
With those concepts as her foundation for thinking about a program, she kept rolling around ideas of how to give women work and give them future opportunities. After some admittedly dead in the water plans, a friend mentioned a pair of shoes Bohannon made from flip flop soles and ribbon, and that was the idea she ran with. From that she started sourcing materials, and gathering some funny stories along the way.
“The name of the company, Sseko, is derived from the Ugandan word for laughter,” she says. “I knew when I walked into this world it was going to be messy and I might not be able to do anything about it. But being perfect is the enemy of good.”
Sseko employs two groups of women: those that are university bound and those that are exiting the sex trade. They live together and work together. There 35 people on staff, two Americans, and four Ugandan management employees.
“This year we’re in 100 retailers,” she says. “But when we started I was selling sandals out of my car.”
Sseko is getting ready to accept its fourth class of workers. Bohannon and her husband, Ben who quit his job to join Sseko full time this past year, live in Portland. She spends three months a year in Uganda.
“It’s important to be to have structured the business as a means for economic development. Unless we invest long term in countries like Uganda, it won’t be sustainable development,” she says.
One way of achieving that goal is sourcing all of the materials for the sandals from eastern Africa. Another is the long-term goal of turning Sseko over to its Ugandan employees one day.
“There’s a space between philanthropy and business and we want to occupy that space. Sseko is registered in Uganda and the U.S. as a for-profit because we hope it has value,” she says.
Bohannon has a three tier approach to the company: first to provide employment; second for the women to work part time, attend school part time be able to mentor someone in community; and third that graduates can come back and Sseko is 100% owned and run by Ugandan women.
She believes to grow her dream she needs to continually ask questions of herself.
“I try to surround myself with people doing awesome stuff. And more important than being with people in your space is to be with those taking risks. I have a lot of bad ideas, but I want to be a person and surrounded by people who are willing to take risks,” she says.
Learn more about the women of Sseko and visit their online store here: http://www.ssekodesigns.com