Support That Provides Stability – Improving Lives One Day at a Time

The Market Project’s innovative business model is responsive to the complex needs of survivors of trauma, trafficking and exploitation. In response to our 2021 employee surveys, The Market Project has committed $75k in 2022 to ensuring that Nguvu Dairy employees have access to nutritious lunches, medical care, and community building activities that help provide additional stability in their lives.

Nutritious Lunches: The Market Project provides daily lunch stipends to all Nguvu Dairy employees, its 175+ workforce, at the cost of approximately $0.88 per employee per day. The lunches address employees’ immediate nutritional needs. Most Nguvu employees expend significant energy producing yogurt or selling from bicycles, riding distances as far as 45 miles per day.

Medical Insurance: The Market Project provides medical insurance to department heads and funds emergency medical care for workers who may be injured on the job.

Building Community: The Market Project sponsors each worksite’s quarterly team building activities. Activities include trust-building exercises and meals together. A supportive community which instills trust amongst fellow workers is an important component of the trauma healing journey.

Context

Guided by the belief that a stable job is often the critical missing link in a person’s trauma healing journey, TMP leverages the power of the marketplace and a deep understanding about the impact of trauma to help men and women who have experienced complex trauma, exploitation, and human trafficking. By operating market-based businesses and partnering with local aftercare organizations, TMP builds healing workplaces.

The Market Project’s business in northern Uganda is Nguvu Dairy. Nguvu (meaning “energy” or “strength” in Swahili) has a production center in Gulu and currently offers jobs in 8 northern Ugandan towns, employing 175 who produce, distribute, and sell yogurt. Our business model establishes a sustainable enterprise that employs many in the local at-risk population while creating an excellent, affordable product. The community at large is positively impacted by job creation, a healthy and, for many customers, otherwise unavailable product, and trauma healing.

At least two generations in northern Uganda have experienced deep pain and relate to others out of that place of pain. Northern Uganda’s people have immense physical and emotional needs stemming from chronic poverty, a byproduct of the country’s 20-year war with the Lord’s Resistance Army. Uganda remains one of the world’s poorest countries.

Nguvu offers stable jobs in a supportive workplace to vulnerable working-age youth, the chronically poor, and survivors of abuse, exploitation, and human trafficking. In this region, access to a healthy workplace is unavailable to most, and yet work is essential for trauma survivors in need of long-term healing.

The Market Project has pledged to improve the lives of Nguvu Dairy employees one day at a time within the larger context of alleviating poverty, providing nourishment to a community that does not have access to fresh dairy products and offering employees the tools based on sound mental health principles to begin their long-term healing from trauma experienced in northern Uganda.

In Their Own Words

I love working with the youth… Most have lots of vision in life, a lot of passions in life. So, it helps me to talk to them, guide them, mentor them and coach them in certain things they want to do. I take my life experience and try to interact with them to see how I can be of help to these young people. – Solomon, Nguvu Dairy Mentor