Sewing New Futures

Candice Whitely '06, above, joined the ministry started by her friend Kristin Braddock '06. “Once I saw how effective it was and how beautiful all the girls were, I wanted to join forces with them.”

Two alums reach out to Indian girls snared in prostitution

The hopeless have found their hope … oppression turning to praise.

The song rising in DeSantis Family Chapel aptly set the stage for students to learn about Indian women trapped in a nearly unimaginable yoke of prostitution. And more importantly, the students would learn how they could help bring hope to such hopeless.

“The community we’re working with, they’re labeled as criminals,” said Kristin Braddock ’06. “That’s really why they’re stuck in the cycle of inter-generational prostitution, because of their caste status.”

As part of the university’s Justice Week programs,

Braddock had come to tell about Sewing New Futures, a nonprofit organization that she’s leading with a fellow member of the Class of 2006, Candice Whitely. The two are reaching out to women in the Perna caste, offering them an alternative to prostitution and a fellowship of love and acceptance.

“These kids are born labeled as outcasts,” said Braddock. Because of long-established cultural practices and prejudice, women in this caste are blocked from education and job opportunities, she said. They typically marry as young teens, “purchased” by their in-laws for thousands of dollars.

“Then they’re expected to work off that bride price by prostitution,” Braddock said. “They’re forced into servitude by their family.”

Braddock began to learn about the plight of the Perna women a few years after graduating from PBA. She went on a church mission trip to India and later moved there to work with a large organization fighting sex trafficking.

As she got to know people in the community, “the girls would bring me things they would sew and they would ask if I could sell them back in my country.”

Braddock did so, and amazed the girls with the money their handiwork generated. They responded: “We want to do this all the time.”

Braddock had majored in organizational communication and also had taken business courses at PBA. She wrote a business plan, raised money from family and friends, won a small grant and struck out on her own with Sewing New Futures.

(www.sewingnewfutures.com)

She rented a small place and opened a center where young women could come to sew scarves for sale in the U.S. and through the Internet. “The first year we really struggled,” said Braddock. “I had never run a business before. We made a lot of mistakes, but every month we got by, somehow.”

Braddock took no salary from the operation, but has

(Continued on page 6) supported herself with consulting and various other jobs. She enlisted the help of friends for product design and ideas, and she kept in touch with other PBA grads, kindred spirits shaped by the ethos of their college years.

“Going to this school changed my outlook on a lot of things,” Braddock said. She recalled the prevailing attitude on campus: “If someone was in need, you help them,” whether the need was the cafeteria worker with a sick son or the refugee suffering injustice overseas.

Braddock had become involved in the university’s Justice Club through her friend Candice Whitely, a religion major with a biology minor. Whitely went on to study nursing at Columbia University, becoming a nurse practitioner and ultimately serving two stints in war-torn countries with Doctors Without Borders. After finishing the second of those assignments, in 2015 “on a whim” Whitely booked a vacation trip to visit Braddock and see what was happening inside Sewing New Futures.

“I knew from the moment I walked into the center that I had to be a part of it,” said Whitely, in a telephone interview. “Once I saw how effective it was and how beautiful all the girls were, I wanted to join forces with them.”

So Whitely came back to the States, filed for 501(c)(3) nonprofit status for the organization and began to raise funds and sell products. The two friends had complementary skill sets. “I’m a very big-picture person, a visionary,” said Braddock. “Candice is so good at making sure nothing gets lost in the day-to-day.”

With Whitely’s help the operation blossomed, buying new sewing machines and expanding