One Common Thread -

You may have heard us talk about One Common Thread on our channels before or saw that they visited Cindy in our design offices recently. We are excited to share more with you today about this incredible organization, everything they are doing to support this community, and how you can be a part of it.

The following post is by Guest Post Author: Courtney Kimball of One Common Thread

Our Mission

TO EMPOWER WOMEN BY DEVELOPING SELF-WORTH WITH AN OPPORTUNITY TO WORK, RECEIVE A SUSTAINABLE INCOME, AND SET A NEW STANDARD FOR THEIR CHILDREN. WE DO THAT, ONE HEXAGON AT A TIME.

My name is Courtney Kimball and my sister, Kym Frey, and I founded the non-profit (501c3) organization, One Common Thread. It is such a privilege to tell you our story and introduce you to some of the women we work with that create these beautiful quilts that we sell online, here in the states. All of the profits from the sales of the Finished Quilts and Quilt Kits are sent back to the women, who are our Makers, that live in the slums of San Pedro Sula, Honduras.

Let’s start from the beginning though, and let me tell you how OneCommonThread.org all got started. Honestly, it really was started by accident. I had been living in San Pedro Sula, Honduras for about a year and a half and one day, I had 13-year-old girl approach me who was a friend of my daughters, and she asked me if there was a way that she could make $5. She needed the money for bus fare to go to the capital in Tegucigalpa (About a 3-hour trip from where I lived in San Pedro Sula).

I had started making an EPP hexagon quilt for my oldest daughter’s upcoming wedding. Of course, basting the hexagons is time consuming and isn’t as much fun as sewing the quilt together- so I told her if she helped me, I would pay her to sew hexagons.. She made 500 hexagons a few hours time! Making her profits well over the original $5 that she needed. The next day her mother, aunts, and cousins all began calling me asking if they could make hexagons as well. So, I called my sister, Kym in the states (Utah) and told her the story while also expressing that this might be a way to help some of the women that I knew who lived in the slums. We decided we needed to do something to help these women who were desperate for work. So, that’s what we did. We put them to work not knowing how we were going to initially pay them. But Kym assured me that we would find a way and that was the birth of OneCommonThread.org. We quickly set up a website explaining our mission and started by just posting Quilt Kits for sale. However, after seeing how well these hexagons were being made, we moved on to finished quilts. Then we started posting and selling their quilts online.

The name One Common Thread came from the idea that my sister and I are both mothers, sisters, aunts and women. Though our lives were much different than these women in the slums, we still had all of these same things in common. We had a one common thread that linked us together. We are women who love and want to help other women, children and families. Through our one common thread, we realized that we can make this possible for the women who live in the slums of San Pedro Sula, Honduras.

To give you a background on San Pedro Sula, Honduras, it is has been considered the “Murder Capital of the World.” The women that live in the slums there are treated as possessions and are often left homeless with their children as the men no longer see value in them and leave them for something or someone new. In general, Honduras has the highest femicide rate in the Latin American region, with 6.2 cases per 100,000 inhabitants with only 5% of crimes against women being investigated. During the pandemic, violence toward women increased significantly. In fact, it was written that one woman was murdered every 27 hours in Honduras in 2021. *National Observatory of Violence https://www.telesurenglish.net/news/One-Woman-Was-Murdered-Every-27-Hours-In-Honduras-in-2021-20220126-0001.html

At One Common Thread, one of our main goals is be able to give all monetary donations and profits from the selling of the quilts and kits, back to our Makers. We do that in two ways:

1. By supporting our makers with a weekly income by purchasing their finished quilt products or hand sewn hexagons at an agreed pricing. This gives them enough for a weekly sustainable income.

2. By going back with the proceeds of the sales and improving our Makers living conditions, supporting their children’s education, helping with medical expenses, and supplying items to them that the gangs cannot extort from them. (Yes, gangs are a huge problem in the Honduras.)

Today we work with over 80 Makers who have learned the skill of Hexagon Quilting. Through our website, OneCommonThread.org we are able to sell the Finished Quilts and Quilt Kits that our Makers have made. We also have a direct link to Donate if a visitor to our website feels so inclined.

We are so proud of these women and the skills that they have acquired through teaching them the art of quilting with hexagons. It is amazing to see how little they knew in the beginning to being the fine craftswomen that they are today. We love these women, and our only wish is to help bring them or the next generation out of poverty. Every time we go down to visit, it is amazing to see their children in school, that they are getting medical attention, that they are finally able to consistently put food on their table, and their self esteem has grown exponentially. It truly is like watching a miracle unfold before our eyes.