The DTES Women’s Artisan Collective: Creating & Crafting for Cultural Healing

With the holidays just around the corner, support the artist and artisans of DEWC by joining us at the upcoming Winter Markets!

The Downtown Eastside (DTES) Women’s Artisan Collective is a new program, developed from the work of the Women’s Summer Market, intending to bring crafting opportunities to women in the Downtown Eastside. Through the DTES Artisan Collective, women explore and develop their creative expression with traditional and non-traditional artisan products, including sage bundles, feather fans, cedar earrings and medicine bags, as well as bathbombs, soaps and salves.

The program is two-fold, with a peer focus: giving women of the community access to craft circles and workshops, as well as providing teaching opportunity for featured artisans who are actively producing their own beadwork, leatherwork, or other crafts.

In this way, the DTES Women’s Artisan Collective honours the knowledge-keepers and wisdom that women hold within the Downtown Eastside community, offering support for their practice and creating pathways to share their generative and

healing work.

Many, if not all women participating in program have experienced multiple and ongoing traumas, which creates unique challenges for their day-to-day life. Creative practices, shared with others, restore cultural connection, building collaboration, accomplishment, capacity and pride. We hope this project will continue to grow in the days to come, giving women’s creativity room to flourish.

Find the DTES Artisan Collective and join us in support of the artists and artisans of DEWC at one of these upcoming markets: