Minneapolis entrepreneur paying success forward to artisan partners around the world

"Oh my God, this is going to be heavy," sighed Joy McBrien, lifting a box of face masks off a shelf. "Like whenever there are spikes of COVID, we see a lot of masks selling that way."

McBrien, 32, is the founder of Fair Anita, a fair-trade for-profit that partners with women in countries like Peru, Cambodia and India.

"We are a women’s rights-focused social enterprise," she said. "We partner with 8,000 survivors of sexual and domestic violence in eight countries to create self-sufficiency for women."

McBrien oversees her for-profit in a northeast Minneapolis warehouse.

She and her eight employees do most of the initial work there, and then her artisan partners create the products from recycled or sustainable materials.

The finished items are sent to Minnesota and are sold in the U.S., Canada and other countries.

"So we’re selling fair-trade jewelry, gifts, and accessories. We pay two to four times minimum wage plus health insurance and educational scholarships," she explains. "We do most of the design work here in Minneapolis, partnering with women around the world in their traditional skills sets and that sort of thing."

McBrien, who started Fair Anita in 2015, says her partnership with survivors of sexual and domestic violence is personal.

She says she was sexually assaulted in 2008 when she was a senior in high school.

"I started Fair Anita because of my own history of rape and sexual violence," McBrien said. "Didn’t really talk to anyone about it. Didn’t know what to do about it. I knew I needed to take action on the issue in order to like feel like myself again. To regain some of that power and agency and whatnot."

In 2009, McBrien traveled to Chimbote, Peru, where she says she joined a friend connected with a nonprofit there.

She says she wanted to make a difference.

"I ended up partnering with an organization in Chimbote," McBrien said. "It’s one of the largest poor cities in the world, and at the time had one of the highest reported rates of domestic violence in the world."

That’s where she met Anita Caldas, a social worker who became a close friend.

During her visit, McBrien says she helped to build a shelter for women — helping herself to heal in the process.

"So I worked alongside Anita, who’s a social worker in the community, one of my favorite humans in the world to build a battered women’s shelter," she said. "It was really creating this women’s shelter and partnering with these survivors. In Peru for the first time, I felt like, really at peace and like at home, that I had this community we were building with other survivors."

She says since then, she’s returned back to the area at least 20 times.

By 2015, using $10,000 in savings and $40,000 in funds from an area church, McBrien was prepared to launch Fair Anita.

She was busy networking with what would be a total of 19 artisan cooperatives from around the world.

"Ultimately, what Joy witnessed first-hand was a community really trying to figure out how they were going to take care of each other," says Jessica Moes, a customer and a big fan of Fair Anita. "You can still run a business that is economically friendly for your own customers, and you can do some good in the process — and really center the creators and the human element of it, which I think is a really cool model that all businesses can learn from."

Moes was among a group of women who went on a trip with McBrien in February 2020 to check on her artisan partners in Chimbote.

McBrien was intending to fly home in mid-March.

Then, the pandemic hit.

Moes was able to get out of the country, but McBrien never made it.

"I was walking to the bus to get me to the airport, and I was violently robbed in a planned attack me. I was dragged behind a taxi," she recalls. "They got my medication, they got all my money, my phone, my passport, the whole thing. That was on Friday, March 13th."

McBrien says that evening, the Peruvian president, with six reported COVID-19 cases in the country, decided to close the borders.

With no passport, she sheltered-in-place at Caldas’s house.

"Luckily, Anita took me in and let me stay with her for the next month," McBrien says. "You could only go to the grocery or the bank, and I could go to neither of those because I didn’t have any form of identification. If you were found to be breaking the rules, you could go to jail, you could go to prison, you could be beaten."

After two months, she says she was able to leave Peru after helping to coordinate with 200 other Americans stuck in rural parts of the country, working to get them on a repatriation flight.

McBrien says she was eventually able to catch a military transport flying to Washington, DC, where her parents picked her up.

Back home in Minnesota, she did a pandemic pivot, selling facemasks, made with the help of her artisan partners.

But instead of keeping any profits, she decided to pay it forward.

"I felt pretty gross about the idea of profiting off of something that was needed in a pandemic, that it was a public health issue," McBrien said. "We decided, as an organization, that we were going to donate 100% of the proceeds from our mask sales. This is to our artisan partners, who while they were taken care of during the pandemic, they still have their jobs, they were still making their money, we were doing prepayment, taking care of them."

Since April 2020, she says Fair Anita has been able to donate over $110,000 to her partners around the world — and those women stepped up in their own communities in the midst of the pandemic.

"Our artisan partners were creating baskets of food. We had people delivering cleaning supplies and hand sanitizer and toilet paper," she explains. "We’ve had artisan partners that converted their workshops into COVID relief centers. There were also women who were purchasing oxygen tanks and literally, distributing oxygen to people suffering from the virus."

"They created care packages for one another. They were trying to feed each other, to house each other," Moes adds. "They really elevated the business model that they already created, which was rooted in women supporting women out there in a vulnerable community. They said we’re going to do this in a new way."

McBrien’s work with her artisan partners and her decision to donate the proceeds from her mask sales is getting noticed.

"It’s super-awesome, and I think it aligns well with what co-ops are all about," says Doug Peterson, the director of retail operations at the Wedge Co-op in Minneapolis. "Fair trade is all about using our economic power in America or Europe or anything like that to give back to those communities."

The Wedge has been selling Fair Anita products for about three years, McBrien says.

So far, she says, she’s sold about 25,000 masks and counting.

McBrien says her mask sales are now about 8% to 10% of her business.

She wants those proceeds to continue going to her artisan partners around the world.

Each one making a difference for women around the world.

"We’re valuing them as fully capable individuals that are part of the supply chain," McBrien said. "So I feel really lucky to be able to do something that has such a strong purpose and [is] connected to my own histories and just being able to work with so many exceptional women around the world that were able to collaborate and build something great together."