Stitching together a new life after addiction
One woman was born addicted to heroin.
Another started using drugs with her father, who was taking advantage of her.
Another became addicted at the age of 10 after she saw her mother and grandmother putting meth in their orange juice, and thought that’s just what you did.
Over-prescription of pain killers after a car accident led to another woman’s addiction.
Today, these women are now all gainfully employed – sewing, designing, marketing and helping bring peace to others – at Unshattered, a non-profit organization and boutique in Dutchess County.
During a recent visit to the organization’s new headquarters in Wappingers Falls, the women of Unshattered were busy in production making, photographing, and shipping bags – and not just any bags, of course. These bags are all handmade from fabric left over from renovating new hotels, the interior of an original 1955 Mercedes Benz, Southwest Airline seats, and even graduation uniforms from West Point cadets. Customers have even brought in wedding gowns and other sentimental belongings to be re-imagined by Unshattered’s seamstresses. So far, over 3,000 pounds of fabric have been spared from local waste facilities.
“These materials come to us rather than head to a landfill,” said Kelly Lyndgaard, founder of Unshattered. “We like to say the bags are a representation of the story of these women: something discarded and without purpose remade into something of beauty, and purpose, and meaning.”
After completing treatment, many women return to the workforce with little job skills or a felony on their record, or they have no choice but to move back to an unsafe community.
“Substance abuse is happening in our communities, within our neighborhoods, at every economic level,” said Kelly Lyndgaard, a former IBM engineer who volunteered with a local recovery program. “At the end of a 12-month program it was like, Congratulations, you’re sober! Good luck! And they’d go back to where they came from, and two weeks later they’d be dead.”
Lyndgaard began Unshattered seven years ago to stop the addiction relapse cycle, help train women to rejoin the workforce with tangible skills, and offer them a positive, safe community. Following a successful treatment program, employees then complete a 10-week training program to build their skillset, starting with the basics:
“One of the first lessons is just sewing a straight line. You are gonna mess it up. Here’s a seam ripper. Take it apart, back up, figure out where you went wrong and try again, and that’s okay. Making it safe to fail is sort of the first fundamental lesson of work. “
In addition to that first stitch, every unique Unshattered bag comes with three secrets: Each bag is named in honor of someone struggling with addiction, each has a secret message from the woman who made it – her number of days of sobriety, a song lyric, something meaningful to her – sewn into the lining, and every bag has a one line of gold thread, a nod to the Japanese art form of kintsugi, which means “more beautiful for having been broken.”
Since its inception, only one Unshattered employee has relapsed (a remarkable feat considering 91-percent of opioid users relapse), and 100-percent of Unshattered employees have moved out of transitional housing and live independently within 12 months of employment.
In order to further the mission of providing a pathway to sobriety and economic independence, Unshattered recently moved into a much larger space off Route 376 in Hopewell Junction. (The castle-esque roof is now just a memory of the building that once housed the famed Cadillac restoration company owned by Frank Nicodemus, aka Mr. Cadillac, who built the red Cadillac The Rolling Stones drove across the Brooklyn Bridge to promote their “Bridges to Babylon” tour.)
Through a partnership with Grace Farms in Connecticut and Design for Freedom, an organization with a mission to take human trafficking and slave labor out of the construction materials industry, the renovations at the new Unshattered facility will be the first adaptive reuse project in North America to build with Design for Freedom principals. Lyndgaard said their goal with the justice-centered design is to be “as environmentally responsible with the building as we are with the production.”
“The vision is, as we renovate the building, to get to the point where we have 50 women in recovery working in this space,“ she added. In addition to plenty of space for operations and shipping, the back half of the building will focus on growth and development with a therapist on staff and workshop rooms “so they can really grow and thrive.”
Shop Unshattered’s handmade bags – including their luxury investment collection, which supports the completion of their new facility – in person at the boutique at 1090 Route 376, Wappingers Falls (Monday-Friday, 8am-4:30pm and Saturdays 8:30am - 5pm), and online at unshattered.org. Donations can also be made to directly support Unshattered’s programs from providing one hour of job skills training ($25) to providing an hour of trauma therapy for a woman in recovery ($150). More info: https://unshattered.org/pages/ways-to-donate
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