Bloom & Give: Reversing Gender Inequality Through Education

The love of rich history and unique craftsmanship is what initially drew friends Partha Raghunathan and Madhu Rajendran to the idea of starting Bloom & Give, a socially conscious textile business on a mission to help reverse gender inequality.

After a product sourcing trip to India, the founders discovered artisan cooperatives meticulously designing and crafting beautiful textiles using time-honored traditions. 

While spending time in artisan villages, they noticed the massive gender disparity and inequity. Between the two friends, they have three young girls, making the weight of what they saw hit even closer to home. It seemed that along with the beautiful skills of textile making, truly misogynistic beliefs about the role of girls and women had also been passed down numerous generations. The founders quickly discovered that education is the only effective way for a girl to escape this endless cycle of childhood marriage, pre-teen pregnancy, and abuse.

Bloom & Give continues to work with artisans using the traditional weaving, dyeing and block-printing techniques that the founders discovered during their original visit to local cooperatives. Each product purchased is also combined with a way to directly impact girls education in India. Today, rich fabrics including hand-loomed cotton (Khadi), handwoven pashmina (Cashmere) and raw silk (Tussar) are pieced together by local artists in India as a way to keep both the colorful history alive as well as to fund life-giving education opportunities for girls through Bloom & Give’s business model. The impact on both the artists and the girls is far-reaching.

Bloom & Give is currently in the process of converting its company into a 501-c non-profit organization, and we can't wait to cheer them on in their next chapter!