1 week Ago By David Parker, Calgary Herald
Rick Castiglione has produced hundreds of promotional videos and documentaries to help organizations and individuals who work to help improve the lives of others. Telling “stories that matter” has taken him to more than 70 countries, and he recently returned to Uganda with one of his favourite charities. Castiglione first met Sylvia Rempel — founder of Calgary-based Sewing Seeds — in western Ukraine, and since then has been on every one of its overseas missions to the seven countries it serves.
Rempel was the founder of Sun Ice, which designed and manufactured clothing worn by Canada’s first Everest expedition. Its success helped it win the contract as a supplier to the 1988 Winter Olympics. She sold the company name in 2002, but purchased the fabric in the stockroom and had it transferred to her small warehouse off Edmonton Trail.
Her new journey began when 100 Huntley Street called to report a donation of 30 sewing machines — and asked if she would travel to Sierra Leone to teach women how to use them. Her amazing experience in the troubled East African country, seeing how newly taught sewing skills could make such a difference to the lives of women, resulted in her founding Sewing Seeds. The organization provides a set of skills that could lead to financial security, healthy families and stronger communities, resulting in many women benefiting greatly from her passion to develop a sewing skills training program.
It has transformed lives in areas she has visited, and has established sewing centres in Sierra Leone, Ukraine, Haiti, Peru, Mexico and Guatemala. Uganda is a new country for Sewing Seeds to support. Castiglione has spent a lot of time in Africa, producing videos and escorting his safari tours.
A considerable amount of his time has been in Uganda, where he met a woman in Nkuringo — a small, remote community in that country’s south where he has spent a considerable amount of time — who shared that she had a heart to teach local women how to sew. Recognizing how she could benefit from a Sewing Seeds program — which always needs a partner on the ground in any country — with the help of a not-for-profit organization in Uganda and his Rotary Club of Calgary Downtown, the newest Sewing Seeds Program has launched. The team of four eager volunteers willing to share their skills — along with Castiglione — will be busy for three weeks teaching a group of 13 women and two men how to sew together the patterns for dresses, shorts and purses that were pre-cut here by volunteers at the Calgary Sewing Centre.
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