BALLSTON SPA — Nourish Designs, an appropriately named small business which calls Ballston Spa its home, creates apparel and gift items featuring original hand-drawn mandala designs by Betsy Phelps Seplowitz. Every purchase made through Nourish provides meals for kids through the Regional Food Bank of Northeast New York.
Last fall, Nourish designed custom mandalas featuring Scotty paws and Scotty dogs – the school mascot – for each of the elementary schools in the Ballston Spa Central School District. Nourish designed spirit-wear collections for each of the four schools in a partnering with a local silk-screening business.
“I was a stay-at-home mom for about 10 years, figuring what my next move would be and it just kind of happened. I started drawing and doodling, started drawing mandalas. People were responding positively to them and thought I should do something positive with this,” says Seplowitz who grew up in Hoosick and eventually made her way to Ballston Spa.
“I’ve always been fascinated with patterns in nature. They’re all around us and a mandala, a circle with repetitive patterns, just spoke to me as my form of meditation,” she says.
A few years ago, Seplowitz had been asked to help with a new Backpack Program at her kids’ elementary school. Seplowitz has two children who are in the Ballston Spa School District. “I had no idea what it was,” she says. She learned the program helped kids who don’t have reliable access to food over the weekends.
“There is a program organized by the Food Bank that supplies non-perishable, easy to make food which can be discreetly distributed in backpacks to children so they aren’t without food over the weekend. The school just needed some volunteers to go down to the foodbank and pick up the food. I’ve been doing it ever since,” she says.
Nourish works with the Regional Food Bank of Northeastern New York and provides funding specifically to programs which serve children. One such program is the BackPack Program which provides weekly food to school-aged children who otherwise may not have sufficient access to nourishing meals.
Her website - nourishdesigns.com – features dozens of wearable products for sale featuring the mandala design, and each purchase provides nourishing meals to kids in need. The meals provided to date number more than 25,000, Seplowitz says.
For more information on how these mandalas are feeding kids, or to see the current line of available products in the online store, visit www.nourishdesigns.com
