A Lower Lonsdale entrepreneur is donating all profits from her skincare company's holiday sales to help fight hunger.
Nature's Creations founder Suzanne Laurin-Seale has pledged to give all of the profits from sales during the month of December to a children's meal program in an impoverished area of Davao, in the southern Philippines.
Along with her husband, independent filmmaker John Seale, the owner of the local aromatherapy and body care company has pledged $30,000 to the program, which she says will feed 100 children a hot meal every day for a year.
"We've committed to doing it because it's more important than so many other things we'll spend our money on," says Laurin-Seale, who was moved to action after learning of the cancellation of the meal program from a friend, Inneke Elaschuk, who worked for seven years as a midwife in the slums of Davao. Elaschuk's husband Patrick is an executive director at Hope for the Nations, the faith-based organization that supports the meal program.
For the holiday season, Nature's Creations, at 205 Lonsdale Ave., is selling specially designed gift boxes that feature the company's own Natural Beauty Skincare brand of products.
Each box contains four items: a mist, a French-milled complexion bar, a soya candle and a pair of exfoliating gloves. Customers can choose from three aroma blends: Peace (patchouli, black pepper and cardamom), Bliss (orange, ylang ylang and cedarwood) or Provence (grapefruit, rosemary and lavender).
In keeping with the company's ethos to reduce its environmental impact, the products are packaged in a hardboard box that Laurin-Seale is asking customers to keep out of the landfill by reusing it as a keepsake container for photos or mementoes. Each gift set is $35, or $30 when more than one is purchased.
Laurin-Seale says she and her husband will hand over a cheque for $30,000 to the Elaschuks in January. In February, the couple will travel to the Philippines to visit House of Jubilee, the education centre that hosts the meal program.
The couple's longer term goal is to raise an additional $69,000 to build a school on the site and to eventually develop an organic farm that would provide food and a micro-enterprise business to ultimately finance the education centre.
This is not the first international aid initiative that Laurin-Seale has supported through sales at her 18-year-old skincare company.
In 2004, she threw her support behind a clean drinking water project in the West African nation of Burkina Faso and helped to raise the $18,000 required to drill a well at a village orphanage threatened with closure. Natural Beauty Skincare sales later funded half of the costs to build a primary school at the site, she says.
The project also provided support for orphanage staff to set up a food garden and a micro-enterprise business. The project is now independent and sustainable, says Laurin-Seale, who notes in a release that the community members now grow their own food, have safe drinking water, have a small banana plantation for profit, are becoming educated and can financially sustain themselves.
Laurin-Seale says the goal is to implement in the Philippines a similar fundraising and business model - one that leads to sustainability, independence and hope.
