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Blue Turtles campaigns to fight famine in East Africa
[Fri 18/11/2011 11:22:41]
A special pendant was created by the business, which was inspired to take action after the United Nations declared the famine and revealed 13 million people are at risk.
Featuring words from the popular and emotive Ghandi quote ‘Be the change you want to see in the world’, the pendant is designed to inspire customers to do their bit to make a better world.
“The idea came to me that we could leverage the power of the Poetic Pieces collection, which is a jewellery collection designed to inspire and affect positive change,” says director Doron Berger.
“We thought of a few powerful quotes and asked people what they thought of them. ‘Be the change’ was clearly the quote that most people felt summed up the sentiment of our fund raising project and so we created the [piece].”
Unlike the rest of Blue Turtles products the pendant is the only piece it sells directly to the public. The not for profit campaign donates $33 from the sale of the $59 necklace, with the money donated to Action Against Hunger, part of ACF International.
“If we donated the whole retail price to charity we would end up digging into our own resources, which is all good and well, but inevitably we would reach the limit of what we could afford and then we would have to stop. We are, after all, only a small family business.
 “We engineered this campaign so that as long as the ‘Be the Change’ pendant is in demand, we’ll always have something to give. As the campaign develops and we begin to cover our initial set-up costs, we’ll be able to contribute more per pendant sold,” he explains.
Berger believes it is important to run the Be the Change campaign because the suffering in East Africa is a timely reminder that despite the current economic climate we’re doing okay.
“How can we wish for better for ourselves without considering the plight of others? At the moment the developed world is gripped by the fear of economic woe.
“Just think for a moment how the parents of a child in the throes of death – because there simply isn’t any food – would feel about our kind of economic uncertainty. We’ve still got it good and it would pay to feel gratitude rather than angst, and to think about those who are worse off than us,” he says.
Retailers are urged to support the project by stocking the pendant or distributing information in store about the campaign.
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Jewellery wholesaler 
