BOZEMAN – Josh Allen traveled to Ethiopia in 2012 with two other members of Bozeman’s Journey Church, to help organize a Global Leadership Summit in the capital city, Addis Ababa. While there, he met Levi Benkert, who described to Allen the need orphaned Ethiopian children have for reliable meals.
Benkert is the founder of Bring Love In, a program that cares for 54 orphans in Addis Ababa, coupling them with widows in their local Christian community. He told Allen about how his program houses the children, and how the adopted mothers care for six or seven orphaned kids in each home.
Allen, owner of Bozeman’s Dee-O-Gee pet store with his wife Holly, decided then and there he could use his business experience to help widows and hungry children worldwide. Allen created a new business called WO Design – Widows + Orphans, pronounced “whoa” – and his first product, the WO Bone will assist children in Ethiopia.
“Each [WO Design] product will have a direct correlation with widows or orphans in a developing nation,” Allen said. “There’s just so much need out there. I could probably just focus on [Ethiopia] for a long time and still not help enough.”
On March 19, Allen launched a campaign on the crowdsourcing site rockethub.com to raise the $25,000 startup cost. The campaign allows people to purchase WO Bones as a part of their donation and closes May 1. With the sale of each dog toy, Allen will give the cost of two home-cooked lunches for children previously orphaned, coordinated by Bring Love In.
If the campaign is a success, the bones will be a Montana product, molded in Manhattan or Kalispell, Allen said.
“It’s incredible what Josh is doing,” Brenkert said in an email from Addis Ababa. “We are excited to see what comes of it, and really thankful that he chose to step outside the box and do something creative that will help these kids, while also building a great business in America.”
A young orphan in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia who is part of Bring Love In’s “Forever Families” program, that WO Design will support with home-cooked lunches through sales of its dog toy the WO Bone. PHOTO COURTESY OF BRING LOVE IN
In Ethiopia, population 93 million, an estimated 13 percent of children have lost one or both parents. That’s about 4.6 million children, and likely 100,000 in Addis Ababa alone said Brenkert, originally from California.
It has become more difficult for westerners to adopt Ethiopian children in recent years, according to Tara Bradford, Director of Encompass Orphan Care in Bozeman.
“About four or five years ago, the adoption process was pretty smooth, when we adopted our own kids from there,” she said. “It wasn’t as expensive as some countries could be, it was approximately an 18-month process start to finish.” But the Ethiopian government has begun regulating the process more to combat unethical adoption, Bradford explained.
“You’ll see that trend,” she said. “A country that doesn’t have an adoption infrastructure, it’s easier, but [then] their government can’t handle the flood. The government reacts and it slows down.”
This trend makes assistance for children in their home country that much more important, since poverty and disease can break up a family even if the parents are still alive, Bradford said.
By caring for kids where they live, WO Bone is getting ahead of that problem.
If Allen reaches his funding goal, it will likely take one to two weeks to make the tooling and another couple weeks for production, he said. WO Bones should be on retail shelves across the country in late June or early July if all goes as planned.
To learn more or find a link to fund the WO Bone, visit wodesign.com.
We all are familiar with using a limited palette, but do you use one? Do you know how to use a
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We all are familiar with using a limited palette, but do you use one? Do you know how to use a limited palette to create different color combinations? Are you tired of carrying around 15-20 different tubes when you paint plein air? Have you ever wanted to create a certain “mood” in a painting but failed? Do you create a lot of mud? Do you struggle to achieve color harmony? All these problems are addressed in John’s workbook in clear and concise language!
Based on the bestselling “Limited Palatte, Unlimited Color” workbook written by John Pototschnik, the workshop is run by Maggie Shane and Annie McCoy, accomplished landscape (acrylic) and plein air (oil) artists,exhibitors at the Big Sky Artists’ Studio & Gallery and members of the Big Sky Artists Collective.
Each student will receive a copy of “Limited Palette, Unlimited Color” to keep and take home to continue your limited palette journey. We will show you how to use the color wheel and mix your own clean mixtures to successfully create a mood for your paintings.
Each day, we will create a different limited palette color chart and paint a version of a simple landscape using John’s directives. You will then be able to go home and paint more schemes using the book for guidance.
Workshop is open to painters (oil or acrylic) of any level although students must have some basic knowledge of the medium he or she uses. Students will be provided the book ($92 value), color wheel, value scale and canvas papers to complete the daily exercises.