Imagine being so impoverished that you have to place your children in an orphanage because you can no longer afford to feed them.

Through his worldwide travels, Brian Donaghy has seen that happen, seen what it does to a family and doesn’t want to see it again.

So with his wife, Julie, as well as Mike and Kim Stuart, Donaghy founded Patronae, a non-profit organization that aims to not only help poor families, but eradicate poverty altogether by creating vocational opportunities for women, as well as a market for the goods they create. And the profits go right back to their communities.

“There’s a cycle of poverty that happens over and over again,” said Donaghy, chief technology officer at Computility in Urbandale. “So we thought ‘How can we solve this?’ We’ve all given to charities where we write the check. What we’re trying to do here is a little different. We’re marrying business and we’re marrying charity and blending them together to create something that’s sustainable.”

Over the past year, the Donaghys and Stuarts have traveled to Guatemala, Thailand, India, Nepal, Bolivia and Mozambique, where they established vocational training programs for women. Through a six-month training program, overseen by Patronae employees who live permanently in each country, they learn to make handbags specific to their culture and heritage.

“We picked these areas because there’s such rampant poverty and there are people who just want an opportunity to do something,” Donaghy said. “It’s life-changing for them because now they’re able to feed their children, send them to school, keep them at home.”

In Guatemala, Patronae workers have trained 24 women to weave handbags, which in this case are based on a traditional Mayan weave. The bags are marketed in the United States under the Angelica collection name, with proceeds going back to community and school programs that benefit women and children in Guatemala.

In Thailand, the Patronae founders saw the needs of that country’s many subsistence farmers who grow rice, but often require additional income to send their children to school and buy clothing. Here, where they can’t even use sewing machines due to a lack of electricity, 40 women have learned to weave raw silk into handbags that are part of the Sumalee collection.

“It’s kind of like teaching them to fish instead of giving them a fish,” Donaghy said. “The great thing about this is that they are all so willing and ready and want an opportunity to do something, somebody to believe in them, somebody to give them an opportunity.”

Donaghy said creating microenterprises in poor countries is not a new concept, but Patronae has gone a step further and created a market for those microenterprises’ products. The handbags are being sold for $20 to $100 at the organization’s store at Valley West Mall, which opened in May. It is temporarily closed while the Donaghys and Stuarts travel to Guatemala, but will reopen in late August and remain open through the Christmas season.

Patronae will soon begin to distribute its handbags through a home party business model, which will provide job opportunities for women in the United States, as well as a means of sharing the story of the organization and the women and children behind the handbags.

Donaghy said the Patronae model creates a “virtuous circle” that starts with a microenterprise that provides income for women in poverty. People purchase the handbags and carry them, thereby spreading a message that it is easy to make a difference. And finally all of the proceeds go back to those areas to educate and care for women and children.

“We provide jobs for women in the U.S. so that they can distribute the handbags and tell the story, that it’s easy to make a difference in people’s lives; all you have to do is carry the Patronae bag,” Donaghy said. “Patronae is a Latin word meaning ‘protectress.’ By buying a handbag, you are the protectress of the women and children who produced it.”

The Donaghys and Stuarts will spend the coming months ensuring that operations in each country become operational, though in countries such as Mozambique, which lack any infrastructure, the enterprises will take up to two years to become fully operational. They plan to take Patronae national in January and expand the organization from six to 18 countries in two years.