The 2025 Houston International Quilt Festival
Loreena Paau was one of several artists in the village of Midway, Belize, who made embroidered blocks for the Belize Forest Quilt (2012). The quilt is one of 17 exhibited at the Houston Festival by The Advocacy Project
The Advocacy Project (AP) is delighted to have been invited to exhibit advocacy quilts at the 2025 Houston International Quilt Festival.
Advocacy quilting was born in 2007 when several weavers from BOSFAM, a women’s association in Bosnia, used a traditional kilim (carpet) to commemorate family members who had been murdered in the Srebrenica massacre (1995).
Working through partner organizations in the Global South, AP has helped hundreds of women and girls from 26 countries tell their stories through stitching in the years since. Each project began with training from a local seamstress that was organized by a student volunteer (Peace Fellow) recruited by AP. The blocks were then sent to expert quilters in the US, Canada, UK and Kenya to be assembled into advocacy quilts for use in promoting the work of the local partner. The quilts, artists and quilters have all been profiled on this website.
Our initial goal with advocacy quilting was to give dis-empowered women and girls a chance to express themselves and be heard, but it soon became clear that stitching in a group can also be deeply therapeutic during a time of crisis like the COVID pandemic, or after a personal trauma. Advocacy quilting also builds social capital: many stitching groups have opted to stay together when the stitching ended and tackle social problems in the community. One group in the Kenyan settlement of Kangemi organized a highly successful COVID vaccination campaign. We have provided funding for several similar start-ups that began with stitching.
In recent years we have also placed more emphasis on income-generation. Most of the artists live in very difficult circumstances and have been naturally keen to turn their new stitching skills into a source of income.
In 2020 this led us to launch the Sister Artists program, which enables fiber artists in Africa to work with quilters in the US to make art quilts. The quilts are then auctioned with profits returning to the artists. We have also opened an online store (Southern Stitchers) where fiber artists from the South can sell their embroidered products, and sold tea towels that carry designs embroidered by partners in the South. These initiatives have raised over $20,000.
The 17 quilts on show at Houston are profiled on these pages and were carefully selected from over 70 quilts that we curate on behalf of partners. Click on the page headings to bring up information about each quilt. The 17 quilts carry 243 individual stories (blocks) that were stitched between 2010 and 2021 by 147 women and girls in 12 countries. They were assembled by 42 individual quilters. Four quilts were assembled by teams from quilt guilds. The rest were quilted by nine individual quilters, three of whom – Bobbi Fitzsimmons, Merry May and Anne Watson – are attending the Houston festival.
We hope that this outstanding exhibition will spur interest in advocacy quilting. Our goal in all of our projects – quilting and otherwise – is to provide talented people and motivated communities with the means to exercise their talents while also working towards social justice and social change. Almost 200 quilters and fiber artists in the North have participated in a quilt project since 2007 and we hope that Houston will open the door to more volunteers.
Contact Bobbi Fitzsimmons – bfitsimmons@advocacynet.org – for more information. Our thanks to Humanity United for supporting our quilting program.
Click here for photos from the Houston Festival!
