As an American tourist visiting Hanoi in 1997, Marichia Simcik Arese extended a simple goodwill gesture to a group of struggling teenage students in Vietnam. The youths were working at a restaurant and using their down-time to fashion picture frames from empty aluminum cans.
"They would sell the frames to pay for their education," she recalled. "I told them if they would make 50 and send them to me, I would try to sell them in the U.S. and send the money back to them."
When the package arrived at her Pacific Palisades home a few months later, there were 300 picture frames inside.
"I wanted to put them in the trash -- the recycling bin," she laughed. "What was I going to do with 300 frames made out of trash?"
But in four months, she managed to unload them "through the PTA, my friends, parents I knew. . . . Everybody I met, I offered a picture frame."
By March 1998, Arese had raised $7,100. Thrilled, she sent the money back to Vietnam.
Then "magic happened," she says now. The students decided to keep $1,775 for their education and send the rest to a school in a remote village in northern Vietnam to pay for the education of 10 Hmong orphans.
"That these young people who had so little for their own lives would give so much to help others . . . that was amazing to me," she said. "In my mind, the concept was born: That giving should not just be the privilege of those who are rich."
And from that came the Spiral Foundation.
Her foundation started with frequent trips back to Vietnam. She saw streets littered not just with aluminum cans, but with discarded noodle packages and candy wrappers. Gift items could be made, she thought, from recycling that trash. She hired disabled villagers as the artisans.
Then she met a doctor who helped her refine her plan: Proceeds would go to a hospital in Hue City to pay for surgeries for children with heart defects.
Arese -- everyone calls her Marichia -- knew enough about art to design the gifts. A descendant of Italian aristocrats, she holds a doctorate in art history and spent 15 years as a curator at the Getty Museum. She taught the villagers to fashion bowls, bags and other items from bamboo strips wrapped in discarded bits of plastic. "But I knew nothing about marketing," she said.
So back home she simply displayed the wares on her dining room table, called it a holiday gift bazaar and invited neighbors and friends. Word of mouth did the marketing.
