After spending six years in a St. Louis convent, Maureen Ward decided being a nun wasn’t for her.
“I’ve never been particularly good at obedience or following rules,” said Ward, who entered the convent at 17. “And if I wasn’t going to be a really good nun, I decided I should get out and try to be a good lay person.”
Today, Ward, now 61, runs MakePiece/Peace Inc., a District-based nonprofit that teaches entrepreneurship and financial literacy through jewelry making to underprivileged women.
The organization is designed to help the women get back on their feet and learn the basics of starting their own business.
Since the organization was founded in 2002, the program has graduated 39 people and helped many of them go on to find jobs or start their own business.
While jewelry-making alone isn’t enough to sustain most of the graduates, it’s the fundamentals they’re learning that help them get back into mainstream employment, said Ward.
“It’s more about empowering them,” she said. “We’re trying to give them self-confidence in terms of their ability to make something beautiful and see it sold and get money from it.”
Ward hopes to eventually market the jewelry to vendors, such as gift shops in hospitals and casinos, as a way to expand the business and employ many of the graduates within the Make Piece/Peace organization.
Until then, Ward will continue teaching new clients to make jewelry — something many of them are surprisingly talented at.
“In my original plan I thought I would be designing and the women would be replicating, but it quickly became evident that they had tons and tons of talent and they didn’t need me,” she said. “So they do the designs and I do the grunt work.”
