Histories: Crafting in Worcester

The mini-nonprofit project RAW or Refugee Artisans of Worcester was founded in 2010 to partner with the remarkable craftswomen and craftsmen who had arrived in the city as refugees over the previous ten years. Refugees have continued to resettle in Worcester up to the present day and among their number are craft makers who learned their art in their countries of origin or in craft workshops in the refugee camps to which they had been forced to flee.  This was caused by the severe threat of violence due to political, religious, racial or ethnic origin (the classic United Nations definition of refugees).  

The refugee artisans come from such countries of origin as Afghanistan, Bhutan, Burma, Central African Republic, Democratic Republic of Congo, Iraq, Rwanda, and Syria.  These highly accomplished artisans were often in their fifties and sixties or older and, with RAW’s support through providing craft materials, they have energetically created a range of works including baskets, trays, weavings, sculptures, embroideries, walking sticks, birdcages and even a bamboo bicycle. 

Many of these crafts took on traditional forms and RAW welcomed that, but in conversation with the RAW founders the crafters were often quite open to modifying their art forms a bit, in order to attract wider buying publics throughout Massachusetts via craft fairs and online sales. Indeed, RAW was designed to help empower the refugee artisans in practical, financial ways by selling their creations to the general public and returning at least 85% of the cash proceeds of each sale to the individual artisan, for the craft maker to use in any way she or he wished. The photograph here shows stone carver Buddha Subba carving one of his sculptures.

RAW’s social business model was developed in order to address three interlocking aims.  These were, first, as noted, the goal of empowering the refugee artisans in monetary terms.  The older artisans had limited access to the standard Massachusetts job market due to age and limited fluency in English, so cash sales of their artisanal work directly provided economic sustenance to them, as well as prestige and recognition in their communities and wider Massachusetts. 

Secondly, RAW’s partnership with artisans was designed to help preserve the heritage arts that the craftspeople brought with them on their arduous refugee journey across numerous national borders.  Younger generations of the crafters’ family members, quickly enmeshed in Worcester jobs and public schools, were turning away from heritage arts for many practical, good reasons.  But, art loss was a genuine issue and RAW could assist the artisans in helping their communities keep some of their craft knowledge and skills alive and thriving (a challenging task, no question). 

Thirdly, RAW had and has ambitious educational aims: to partner with the artisans to assist them in learning about the modern-sector American economy in terms of banking, marketing, product design, and entrepreneurship; to foster greater understanding of refugee resilience and creativity among the general Worcester public, young and old; and to partner with local colleges and universities in all aspects of RAW’s programs.  So, over the years undergraduates and graduate students from Assumption University, Clark University, College of the Holy Cross, and Worcester Polytechnic Institute have listened carefully (for instance) to RAW weavers about what they need in terms of new looms (and the WPI students actually built those looms). Students have also interviewed refugee artisans about their lives as creative makers, not as forced migrants ‘deserving of pity’ (as one all-too-common American stereotype goes). 

Faculty and student teams have also collaborated on educational videos and gallery exhibitions about refugee craft making in our city. One of the exhibitions, “Crafting a New Home: Refugee Artisans of Worcester,” at the Worcester Center for Crafts in 2020, epitomized RAW’s view of its maker-associates and their work: the refugee artisans contribute a very great deal to Worcester’s arts scenes and to its social strengths as a longtime ‘city of newcomers.’

Over the years since RAW’s founding, social workers have often commented to the organization’s co-directors and co-founders Ellen Ferrante and Joan Kariko that RAW provides important intangible services to the forced migrant crafters.  Making their crafts and marketing them through RAW, coming to monthly business meetings, interacting with the public at craft fairs, visiting a bamboo farm together, demonstrating how to make their art at local schools and churches  --- all of these activities have been especially valuable to the more socially isolated artisans.  Their self-confidence soars and their sense of loss from being forced to leave their home countries abates a bit.

Ellen Ferrante and Joan Kariko, both of whom have lived in Worcester for years, are longtime arts advocates in the city and passionate supporters of our refugee neighbors. Ellen was the CEO of Fairlawn Rehabilitation Hospital and now does consultancy work in healthcare investments. Joan was the longtime director of Career Planning and Placement for Becker College. She is also a weaver and has taught crafting skills to youth. Ellen and Joan spent a year studying different models of founding and managing nonprofits that work with crafts to empower low income, socially marginalized communities.  

They interviewed economic development scholars and practitioners before establishing RAW as a social business where the refugee partners would be respected as co-equal colleagues and as the highly accomplished artisans that they are.  Both go to the artisans’ homes on a frequent basis to deliver supplies, chat about any questions and suggestions the makers may have, and to pick up completed baskets and so on for sales at fairs. They lead trips to a bamboo farm in Plymouth, MA where the artisans harvest materials for their work; they organize visits to various colleges in town where the crafters demonstrate making their art.  Ellen and Joan do all this as a labor of love and as social advocacy in action.

Making and selling crafts as part of advocacy work for marginalized communities has a long history in Worcester.  In 1852, city women from elite, mostly white Protestant circles helped to found the Worcester Female Employment Society (WFES) to get cash into the hands of desperately poor widows and mothers whose husbands could not work, due to illness or alcohol abuse.  The impoverished women were provided with cloth and sewing materials, to make into sheets for hospitals or simple garments which WFES would then sell.  Local churches would also buy the completed materials and then give them to the poor.  

WFES would also host garment sales, again to raise more money for the client families.  The national economic crisis of 1858 and then the Civil War led to the demise of WFES but this early, anti-poverty social business came back again in slightly altered form in the decades after the war, serving similar purposes and still focused mostly on stitchery work and  impoverished women.  

The latter were definitely not prospering in Worcester’s industrialization boom of the 1870s and 1880s, when the city became famous as a center for wire and tool manufacture and corset factories. A similar aid-the-poor initiative was based at the old Salisbury Mansion downtown, where looms and kilns were brought in to offer paid craft work to both men and women.  This became an important institutional predecessor to what is today the thriving Worcester Center for Crafts, open now to the entire community irrespective of means.