One of the more unu­su­al man­dates giv­en to our Glob­al Is­sues team was to pro­mote sales of one-of-a-kind, hand-wo­ven bas­kets for Ma­cy's Rwan­da: Path to Peace pro­ject. The bas­kets were the cre­a­tion of a re­mark­able group of wo­m­en who had sur­vived the Rwan­dan geno­cide of 1994 -- former en­e­mies who had em­braced their an­ces­tral art of bas­ket weav­ing to build a path to peace, re­c­on­cili­a­tion and eco­nom­ic health. The ob­jec­tive of the cam­paign was clear: bring the sto­ry of Rwan­dan wo­m­en's lives, strug­gles and dreams di­rect­ly to Amer­i­can con­sumer and com­mu­ni­cate, in a com­pelling way, how their purchas­es could di­rect­ly ben­e­fit wo­m­en and their fam­i­lies.

Us­ing ex­traor­d­i­nary video, pho­to­graph­ic and writ­ten ma­te­rials gathered in Rwan­da, we sought to de­mon­s­trate how bas­ket sales were di­rect­ly im­prov­ing the dai­ly lives of the wo­m­en who cre­at­ed them, ty­ing them di­rect­ly to the pos­i­tive im­pact their busi­ness was hav­ing on the eco­nom­ic sta­bil­i­ty and se­cu­ri­ty of post-geno­cide Rwan­da. The en­su­ing na­tio­n­al me­dia cam­paign re­ceived cov­er­age in more than 100 print and broad­cast sto­ries, in­clud­ing AP, New York Times and Los An­ge­les Times