 Break into, and working in the modelling industry can be extremely difficult work. The constant pressures related to models' looks and lifestyles are overwhelming in many cases. The business is highly competitive and getting noticed often requires a great deal of resources, both monetary and personal. While beauty can be defined differently, the razor side of beauty that is often left out and Mary Mukami, the co-founder of Rare Beauty Movement, is out to change the view of beauty, while she explores beauty from different communities and encourages self-love and self-worth. We started it last year at around June. We met with Saudat Ayuen events. So I organized a lot of events and that's where we met with Saudat. And it was persons with disability events and we got to do a lot of activities that involved sort of like the world of persons with disability. And for me that really touched me and I felt like this should reach out to the world. So Saudat and I partnered and we started the movement and our aim was to impact the beauty and the fashion industry. Our main goal is to make sure that the persons with disability are embraced in the entertainment, in the events and in the advertisement industry because most of the times when you go to fashion events you'll never see a person with disability yet they wear clothes and shoes and they attend events. And most of the events are not persons with disability friendly like you'll not find someone who can, you know, like there are no ramps, there are no people to help out and everything which is very sad. Yet there are a majority in our country and in the world. So for me I wanted to change that norm and have events that are basically majority for persons with disability. If it's the runway it's just for persons with disability to showcase the product, to showcase their beauty and, you know, just to change that realm of beauty and everything. The real beauty models are differently able models ranging from persons with duafism, vitiligo and many other forms of disability. For us our target is persons with albinism, persons with vitiligo, duafism and basically just persons with disability. Mostly ladies, that's who we are dealing with for now. Basically because especially for ladies we have a lot of judgement out there. You know there's always judgement of can you do this, can you do that, can you talk like this. So for me I felt like they are not really appreciated well in my view and if you look at some of the ladies that we have they are extremely talented, they are very beautiful. We have ladies who work in banks, they play basketball, they do swimming and they do like competition. They are picked by very big advertisement companies and most of now you see these are just one one people so we want the whole community to be embraced and this to be the new norm. So that when you see a persons with albinism you are not staring and wondering what how is she like that. It should be the norm. We are all one people, we are all one colour so they shouldn't be that separation of all you have vitiligo, why and you know. Most of the times when we even share stories on our pages we shared stories about the journey of our ladies and most of them really have very heartbreaking stories like someone will just meet you up and be like what is wrong with your skin and you're like okay I really can't explain it you know. So we want that stigma to end and have them being embraced everywhere in the world. In order to recruit models to her movement Mary uses social media as a platform to make her cause known to the public. We advertise and we also go to like their special schools as well so we go and we do auditions and we also have like people introduce their friends so if you know a friend you know a friend we come we do auditions for them as long as you're between around 20 to 30 there because that's when you have some free time to do the activities that we have because we have quite a number of activities so we just want someone who's able to be proactive. Once recruited the models go through various trainings such as confidence building, skills equipping and so on. We actually do train them but our training is a bit different so our training is on skills we train on skills, we train on confidence building we train on how to handle yourself in front of people when you go to companies how you're going to carry out yourself so this is basically how we train them because we can't train them on walking or you know the runway normal thing so what we do is just train them on the confidence building and how they're going to approach companies out there as they're looking for jobs and advertisements and all that mostly the trainers are persons that they're also persons with disability as well and Sauda is also one of them my partner she's a very good trainer she's been in the fashion industry she's been in the modeling industry she's actually done a couple of advertisements which are on billboards so she's very qualified for training to our models some of the activities that the models indulging include mostly we do concentrate on events like the recent one that we had for valentines so we do such events where we just have our models go through the runway we invite speakers we invite the speakers and we also have them showcase their talent so basically those are the activities that we have and we also have advertising them advertising products so we go to a company and then they give us the products that they have and then we have our models advertise those products so when you look at our page we have a variety of the products that they've been advertising so what we do we get your talent so what talent do you have if your talent is to make jewelry they be dead jewelry that's what you make and then we advertise on our page and in every event we get you to advertise your products so people are able to buy and that's how you're able to build your career path if you're good at DJ we have a DJ in the team we get you a DJ who's like a professional DJ and then they walk with you that journey so you're able to learn this is how you do it this is how you get people to attend your events like that if you're good at tailoring like making clothes you design your clothes and then in one of the runways the models wear your clothes so it's part of the mentioning and that's how you advertise your clothes Passion and motivation are created once as Maria tests I firstly want to thank God for creating me and giving me that life and giving me that passion to have service for humanity because if it wasn't a thing that I was born with a struggle sometimes you see people do things for the camera just so that they can be seen they have done something so I thank God that it's something which is in me I also thank my parents who have really taken me through that journey especially my mum is a giver she just give, give and give so I think for me I have really learnt a lot from her to give and be kind to people the girls that we interact with are very kindhearted people and they are people who we have the same goals service to humanity and you'd find me out there planting trees, taking care of animals doing volunteer work that's something that I really love I also got people who they have the same goal and that's how we push each other because there's nothing as bad as you having this goal and the people that you are with having a very different goal you will not go on the same path so because the people that we have in the members have the same goal it's very easy for us to push each other to strengthen each other beauty they say is in the eyes of the beholder but personal beauty that comes from within is a greater recommendation than any letter of reference from my perspective beauty is sometimes we look at the outer and basically we just judge a book by its cover but for me I find that there is so much to beauty than just what you see there is how you interact with someone how that person is there are they kind to you are they nice to you what are their thoughts about so much are they impacting the community that to me is what is beauty since individuals, businesses and government entities all need funding to operate how does she acquire hers as of now we are partnering with different organizations it's actually because of the corona that things have laid down but we had partnered with different organizations so for every activity that is done if it's advertising a product or the runway we pay them so we pay them that's one and two we get the mentors so each and every person has a mentor to take them through the journey of the industry definitely especially for events we do have sponsors who come in and they just sponsor the event basically that's and partners as well mostly organizations for persons with disability or organizations who have products for persons with disability most of the times actually we have like tailors who specifically tailor make clothes for persons with disability so they sponsor us so that they can advertise their clothes and make up we have special make up but we have brands that have very good make up for persons with albinism and vitiligo so they also sponsor us and also like shoes we also have shoes for persons with disability and stylish ones Mary finds great satisfaction in what she does especially when she sees her models live a successful life I'll start with when they attend events most people are usually shocked because they come with the mentality of what can we do but when they come they see a different type of people who are confident beautiful, who are dressing up who are very dependent so that's sort of shaping their view on persons with disability and just introducing a different perspective because they get to interact so you get most people are very ignorant and they don't interact with persons with disability so which makes them just judge people so when they come to our event they just get to see a very very different view of people and that's what we are bringing to the table we have Maureen Maureen Awino she's a member of Rare Beauty and she's also a persons with disability she is a very proud mum now her story has been very deep she used to consume drugs she actually never liked herself and attempted suicide a couple of times and it was a very very hurting story because most of it was because of her surrounding most people didn't talk to her didn't like her or treated her different and for her she just felt like the world does not have any meaning so in terms of when we and her clicked we were able to give her that self confidence we worked with her that journey we helped her to change her life she's not a different person she has confidence she can be able to approach a company and that's how she landed her job because she never was confident yet she has studied but she never thought that she'd be picked of her previous job she had a job where people in the organization never treated her well they never liked her they were never good to her and so she felt like I can't even get a good job for myself and she was actually laid down because they thought she was limiting but then we encouraged her we boost her confidence when we were able to help her reach out to a better job she's doing so well she's a proud mum she has a stable job and she's actually enjoying her life just what are some of her greatest achievements? one of our achievements was being able to hold fashion events I think for us that has been a very very big achievement and even having people attend because most of the times the fashion industry usually looked at as this world of different people so we really came in and changed that perspective because we were able to host a couple of fashion events and have sponsors, have partners and have people attend the event so for us that has been really like a big thing for us like a really step forward and then also the number of partners that we've acquired and the number of in terms of partners our girls have been able to get advertisement jobs with our movement so to us that's a really big thing the sale is not always smooth as Mary suggests mostly I'd say access to like different places because most of the times when we are going to do fashion shoots or just shoots the places are not accessible so there's one time we went to this building and the partner wasn't sensitive enough to know that the building doesn't have ramps so it was very sad because we ended up not doing the event I mean the shoot because some members couldn't go into the building some the places were too small I mean it wasn't a good thing so for us that's usually a big challenge to find buildings that are accessible and also to I'd say maybe like to have people not stare so much sometimes when we are out there doing photo shoots we are like what you know like it's just like sort of like a very crazy thing doing you know it becomes very strange like oh my god people exist you know so that to us has been a really really crazy challenge so yeah I think that and also I'd also say that confidence has also been a very big challenge some of the members are still not yet confident and we still are really trying to build that confidence who is also an environmentalist and events planner believes in service to humanity and also participates in charity work she shares with us some of the activities that she does in her free time love for nature started when I was young I'd really go out and plant flowers even if they are not real just go and poke a flower so I felt like loving nature loving animals I am obsessed with taking care of animals I'm that one person who I can't watch Nat Geo because I see one lion eating a carb or something and I'm just crying so for me I really really take care of the environment when I go out and I find someone has thrown something I'd definitely be the one to pick and you know go through it so I really want to encourage people to take care of the environment because if we don't who will live in it and we have our children who we want to live in this world so and also service for humanity I think for me that has also been a passion and I find myself mostly like the weekends I go to children's homes and homes for elderly people and help out as much as I can if it's cooking, cleaning doing anything that I can I really just love helping out I can't help it I love really helping out and for me that's something that is in me and which I'd want to share with so many people I'd want to reach out to people to help them be able to understand that we should take care of each other we should take care of our environment and that we were actually created I'm a Christian so we were created to take care of our environment and something that's in bond there's an organization called Mi Forest which I was working with and their sole purpose is just to plant trees all over Kenya and they do plant whether people know or people don't know people are finding out or not they just plant trees and their goal is to make sure that they are able to at least attend the 10% tree cover so for me being part of that organization I've really learnt to do stuff whether people are watching or not her greatest desire is to find more sponsors to support her great initiative when asked what the future looks like this is what she has to say we are really looking for to have one of the biggest fashion shows in Kenya for purely persons with disability that is our main goal doing small small events just to see how it goes to see how people are embracing it and then boom we just have this very very big fashion event with all the sponsors the big big sponsors and we have our target is a thousand people to attend and we really look for to that so we are in plans of that we are doing as much training as possible as much sourcing for sponsors as possible we really want to impact and change the norm with the events industry you can't change the direction of the wind but you can always adjust yourself to reach your destination let the world know that we should really strive to be there for each other especially just at a time like this you can imagine most people are staying at home by themselves and we should really reach out to as many people as possible and when you have that heart of reaching out helping you'll find yourself not seeing color or difference or status or anything everyone will be equal in your eyes and you'll be able to you know to embrace everyone