Once on the Rooftop, Now Grounded and Weaving Hope at Fabric of Life

In the age of feel-good giving and large national and international aid organizations such as the Gates Foundation, Amnesty International and UNICEF, sometimes the small players go unnoticed, even when they have the best intentions and strongest soul.

And Carol Schillios has a strong soul.

As the founder of the Schillios Development Foundation and owner of the in Edmonds, the energetic Schillios finds that there are barely enough hours in her day to get everything done. She credits a growing team of administrators and volunteers with helping things at the shop and organization run smoothly, especially when she is traveling.

On a crisp and sunny morning earlier this month, I was ushered into the vibrant shop by a member of the Schillios team—a woman who greets me with a large smile and leads me into the back room when I explain that I am there to meet Carol. She seats me at a table full of gorgeously beaded bracelets and says that her boss should be in soon.

Within 15 minutes of my arrival, Schillios breezes in wearing a colorful patchwork coat, dangly beaded earrings and trendy, rectangular glasses. She greets me with exuberance, calls hello to everyone in the shop, and sits down to ask me questions about myself. Her curiosity for others is evident. When I finally turn the tables and urge her to tell me about her foundation and store, the silver-haired Schillios laughs.

“Where do I start?” She looks over to her assistant, Ari MacPherson, who is listening to voice mails. The young woman shrugs with a smile. “Well,” Schillios starts turning her attention back to me, “we are not an aid agency, we are a development organization. We give a hand up, not a hand out.”

She continues to tell me about the life journey that brought her to where she is today.

The Seattle-born Schillios had parents who both worked at Boeing. After a promotion, the family moved to Switzerland, where the young Schillios experienced eye-opening exposure to various cultures and traditions at her international school.

“I was exposed to over 80 cultures, political ideas from different countries, and social ideas that were not your normal Lake City neighborhood components,” Schillios said. “I learned about the world; it really changed our lives."

After six years of overseas living, the family returned to Seattle, but found themselves experiencing extreme culture shock. After one unfulfilling year at a traditional American high school, the adolescent Schillios decided to move to Germany on her own to learn the language.

Two years later, the bilingual teen returned to the United States in order to explore her American side. After consulting with an employment agency, Schillios took work at a credit union, gradually climbing the corporate ladder until she was running a think tank for more than 100 credit unions. She was also traveling at least 250 days a year.

“That lasted two years, and then I burned out,” admitted the woman who is now so busy that nine hours of sleep is on her future goal list. “I started my consulting company in 1984, and I haven’t looked back since.”

As a consultant for microfinance and credit unions, who also spoke fluent French, Schillios was asked to travel to Senegal to help train a credit cooperative. It was the early 1990s.

“That’s when I fell passionately in love with Africa,” the consultant emphatically recalls. “I lived and worked in a village for a month, and the whole ‘people helping people’ model really hit home because there, if you didn’t help people help themselves, they would die.”

This lesson affected Schillios, who saw groups of five or six women joining together to take out loans for their small businesses. The women not only help raise each other out of extreme poverty, they also take care of each other when they are sick or need help in any aspect of their lives.

On her second consulting trip, Schillios was went to Mali, which is also in French West Africa. Here she was paired with a “courageous, well-educated Malian woman” named Kaaba. After spending time together, the two woman bonded over their mutual goals to help the poorest young women of Africa: the homeless teens, the abused, the raped, the starving.

Together, with just $3,000 and an inaugural class of 10 young women, they started the Hèrè jè Center (in the local Bambara language, Hèrè jè means "happiness group"), a holistic learning center designed to stop the cycle of begging and give young women sustainable trade skills to help them earn incomes. Schillios brought back the products produced by the girls, such as fabrics, beaded jewelry and bags, and tried to sell them in order to help fund the school for the next year. It proved tougher than she thought.

“I took out money from my retirement and took out a loan on my house to fund the school for the next few years,” she said. “In retrospect it probably wasn’t a smart business idea, but it was the right thing to do.”

That sentiment permeates everything Schillios does. When Fabric of Life first opened in 2008, she hoisted herself up on the roof of the building in August, and didn’t come back down until Thanksgiving. The stunt, which gained plenty of notice from local meida, was an effort to raise money for her school project. Although donations didn’t reach her $1 million goal, a hefty sum of $106,000 was raised, and an anonymous donor offered to match a dollar for every single person living in the city of Edmonds.

Through donations, fundraisers and profits from the fair trade items sold in her store, Schillios has been able to provide a safe haven for a small group of African girls and give them food, shelter, education and life skills, as well as AIDS prevention and nutrition and health education.

It has been six years since the Hèrè jè Center opened, and it does not run without its challenges. Schillios wistfully spoke about girls who died, girls who got pregnant (resulting in expulsion) and girls who returned to their begging lifestyles. But for every girl who didn’t make it through, there are those who did.

“It moves you in a way that you’re not the same,” she said about working with the young women in the program. “You can’t help but be moved by their courageous way of being in the world. What are their dreams? To be full, to have a shelter for their family and to have enough food to eat. Working with these girls really puts your life in a new perspective.”

For more information about Carol, the Schillios Development Foundation, and to read success stories about the Hèrè jè Center, visit the foundation’s website.