26 December 2011
Newsdesk
Sting and his wife Trudie Styler are hoping that elephant dung and banana fibre bags will become the ‘must have’ accessories of 2012.
The Big Issue – Britain’s social enterprise for the homeless – proudly kicked-off it’s the Bag Issue campaign at a glittering gala event at The House of St. Barnabas, Soho this week attended by more than 200 guests including Sir David Frost and Eddie Izzard.
The Bag Issue offers ‘a hand up not a hand out’ to Indian orphans from Karm Marg - a home for street children based in the outskirts of Delhi.
Trudie Styler has been the patron of the Mukti charity - which funds the Karm Marg orphanage - for the last 10 years and she was delighted to be invited to launch the Bag Issue.
Trudie Styler – who was also guest editor of the Big Issue Magazine last week – said: “There’s a synergy between the Bag Issue and the Big Issue. Both Big Issue vendors and the children at Karm Marg are working their way from the streets.”
“They want to make their own destiny and hold their head up. This gives them self esteem, helps foster communities and enables them to support their own lives,” she said.
The bags are made by women on low subsistence wages from banana skin fibers and elephant dung and will have a series of articles printed on them by The Big Issue.
The first edition of the collectible bags bears the Universal Declaration of Human Rights from 1948 and the will be sold by street vendors, on the Big Issue website and through retailers.
“Poverty is a human rights abuse and Trudie has done wonderful work in highlighting this. I urge everyone to get behind the Bag Issue,” said John Bird – co-founder of the Big Issue.
