Making a Difference: The Laundry Machine Project by Poppy

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The Laundry Machine Project

Since we founded Poppy in 2019, empowering women from seed to ceremony has been central to our mission. With your help, we’re proud to report that we’re making good on that promise.

Through the Laundry Machine Project, we’re directly supporting the women who power the international floral supply chain by giving back the most precious resource: time.

Supporting a majority female workforce in South America

Our team has spent a lot of time in the greenhouses and post-harvest facilities of our partner farms in Ecuador, studying crop production, getting to know the farm workers, and understanding what it takes to run a Fair Trade and Rainforest Alliance Certified farm.

In Ecuador and Colombia, where the majority of the United States’ flowers are grown, the workforce that cultivates, harvests, and packs flowers is majority female. Many of these female workers are the primary wage earners for their families.

Why laundry machines?

During our last visit to the farm in December 2019, we had the opportunity to directly ask these female farm workers what would make their lives better and how we could better support them.

They ultimately explained that every Sunday, instead of getting to enjoy time with their family, they spent their day washing their family’s laundry by hand in a nearby stream. 70 of these workers had joined a waiting list to purchase a subsidized laundry machine for their home, but there were insufficient funds to address the scope of the need.

What these women wanted was simple — they wanted support. They wanted the opportunity to finance the purchase of a laundry machine for their home.

Putting our money where our mouth is

For every Poppy At Home kit, we donate $1 to a worker-owned fund that provides low-payment, interest-free loans to farm workers, so that they can purchase a laundry machine for their home.

We made our first donation of $2,050 in October 2020, which made it possible for 16 families to receive an in-home laundry machine. This Women’s History Month, we’re doubling our donation.

We will keep donating until every family at the farm that wants one, has one.

This works because of you

These donations are only possible because you choose Poppy for your flowers. We can’t thank each and every one of you enough for helping us bring this to life, and for quite literally supporting women, one dollar and laundry load at a time.

The Laundry Machine Project

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