What is it you love?
How will you share what you love with your world?
These are the two questions that have become my inspirational call to action and paved the way for my work in the world today as a visionary guide, teacher, writer, artist and entrepreneur.
I have come to recognize that when we move in the world from a place of courageous love, fearless imagination, and generosity, no matter how difficult the circumstances of our lives, we move with a certain ease, grace, and wisdom. This requires living into a story—a narrative for our lives—which sustains and nourishes us deeply.
STORYTELLER
As a storyteller, I love the alchemical power of story and its ability to transform our lives while connecting us to the very roots of our being. I grew up in the equatorial plains of East Africa, born to parents who had emigrated from Northern India. By the time I was 10 years old, I was sent to an English boarding school where I spent my adolescence. And by the time I arrived in my early twenties, I had been exiled from my country by a tyrannical dictator and become a refugee.
These formative experiences in my early life would teach me how to navigate painful transitions in my life, how to befriend uncertainty while sowing seeds of possibility, and how to see the world from the larger lens of a global citizen. The threads of resilience, trust, courage and vulnerability would be intricately woven into the fabric of the journey.
Honoring the path of the mystic in my work, I seek to weave the sacred with the practical, the universal with the familiar, the visionary with the contemplative, the pilgrim with the entrepreneur. For it is here, in this dance of seeming opposites that our creative powers emerge — it is here, where the spirit of our intention, intuition, and imagination come alive — it is here where the visionary journey begins.
GLOBAL ENTREPRENEUR
For two decades, I was involved with the world of global commerce and enterprise, focusing on women’s entrepreneurship in vulnerable regions of the world.
As Founder of the Womens Peace Collection and Co-Founder of Eziba, both visionary online companies with an innovative humanitarian mission, I worked with women artisans rebuilding their lives in the shadows of war, genocide, and civil strife – in regions like Afghanistan, Rwanda, Darfur, Cambodia, Ethiopia – by offering them an opportunity to sell their products to an international audience.
Invoking the vision of women’s hands as a force for peace, highlights of my work include: the Rwandan Peace Basket, a peace-building initiative between Rwandan widows from both Hutu and Tutsi tribal factions, who came together to create peace baskets as a symbol of their reconciliation after the Rwandan genocide; the Jerusalem Candle of Hope, a peace-building initiative between Israeli and Palestinian women in Nazareth and Bethlehem; and the Darfur Basket of Strength, a remarkable initiative in one of the largest refugee camps in Darfur, Sudan, supporting women in earning a dignified livelihood under extreme conditions.
PRESS
Amber has been widely recognized for her work in global enterprise. She has been inducted into the Business Women’s Hall of Fame by Baypath College (2008); her Rwanda Journals were published by Marie Claire Magazine (2006), and Inc Magazine voted her “Entrepreneur of the Month” (2006). Other examples of national media attention for Amber’s work include articles in the Herald Tribune (European Edition), Chicago Tribune, Boston Globe, and interviews by CNN News and NPR.