Annie Doran works in her small office in her parents’ Westport backyard, which she calls the "shudio" for its small size.

The Providence Journal / Kris Craig

WESTPORT, Mass. — Small-business owners have many things in common, no matter where they’re based.

Long on good ideas, they are typically short on money.

In need of dedicated workers, their employees aren’t always invested in their jobs.

Ready to charge ahead, they regularly fail to reach the right markets, or any market at all.

The situation isn’t much different for nonprofit organizations — especially ones trying to stitch together communties half a world apart.

“I tell people the only reason I got this far is that I had no idea what I was doing; I didn’t see the roadblocks,” said Annie Doran, an upbeat 26-year-old from Westport.

She has spent the last three years learning how to train workers, rally support, overcome government bureaucracy, raise money and live on next to nothing to get her vision off the ground.

Doran is the founder of Fairloom, a nonprofit, fair-trade organization devoted to international community building. Through it, she connects people in the United States with people in Brazil.

They meet in Terra Prometida (Promised Land), a community built by peasant women on Brazil’s north coast, about 1,500 miles north of Rio de Janeiro.

There, U.S. students and educators learn about a different culture while they teach Brazilian women how to create a profitable business from the art of lace-making.

It’s a neat trick, trying to preserve a cultural art and make it marketable at the same time.

She started Fairloom in 2004 with little money other than a $15,000 personal loan she took out, the year after she graduated from the University of Vermont with a degree in early-childhood education. The organization is creating a textile manufacturing cooperative intended to provide sustainable incomes for Brazilian lace-makers through the sale of their goods in the United States.The seeds of Doran’s efforts were planted 30 years ago by her parents, Paul and Ruth Doran, who went to Brazil with the Peace Corps.

They brought back a deep commitment to helping others and a love of the Brazilian people, their daughter said.

“There’s quite a bit of Brazilian culture woven into this house,” Doran said. “I always had this thing kind of developing in my head.”

She’s sitting in a “shudio” — a small studio her father converted from a small shed into a part-time office for her and part-time practice space for her musician sister — outside her childhood home.

The shudio sits in the backyard of her parents’ house just up the road from the ocean in Westport. It’s a warm, sunny summer day, and the light streams in through skylights, brightening the pine plank flooring and blue walls.

In one corner are clear plastic tubs filled with Fairloom creations. On the floor is a footlocker that serves as a sample case.

She’s wearing a white sleeveless vest, olive-colored cargo pants and Crocs. Around her neck is a colorful lace necklace, a Fairloom product.

The lace creations are made using a centuries-old process by a group of once-landless, unemployed women.

In 2004, the women founded Terra Prometida in the city of Fortaleza, occupying an abandoned leather factory with their children.

“It was just a big plot of sand,” Doran said.

A handful of them kept alive a technique, imported from Portugal 400 years ago, for producing a colorful lace called “renda.” The process involves spinning yarn around bobbins made from coconuts and cactus needles stuck in drum-shaped bolsters.

It is labor intensive — making a blouse takes more than 40 hours.

But the women of Terra Prometida were willing to work.

“The first couple of years the women spent the most time teaching others how to make this lace,” Doran said.

At first, only one woman knew how to do it. She taught five others before a second experienced lace maker settled in Terra Prometida.

Doran told them, “My position in [Fairloom] is: While you guys are learning how to make lace, I’ll go and make the structure of [the organization].”

Ever since, she has been recruiting U.S. volunteers to create training programs and help sell the goods here.

In January, an instructor from the Massachusetts College of Art worked with the women on fashion design concepts.

In March, Doran took a group of business professors and students from UMass-Dartmouth to Brazil. They taught the women about production methods and helped them build studio space. Money for the building came from Doran’s father, who loaned the group $15,000, about two-thirds of which has been paid back so far.Next will come more design lessons so this new generation of seamstresses will know how to create fresh patterns. Next spring, Mass Art fashion design students will travel to Terra Prometida for a short stay.

The women are also learning some simple lessons in manufacturing. For instance, a design may be beautiful, but if it takes a lot of cloth and too much time to make, it will be too expensive to sell.

There’s been little in the way of formal marketing or sales programs, yet.

“This year we’re really starting to focus on design and sales marketing,” Doran said.

In the United States, interns from Brown University will help Fairloom reach new customers next summer.

As things progress, the Brazilians are learning about “the bigger business picture,” Doran said, so the clothing they make can become more than novelties. The women are learning how to figure labor and materials costs, set pricing and navigate customs.

But exporting goods to the United States is still problematic. The women aren’t making enough items to warrant the expense of cargo or package shipping. And if Fairloom’s volunteers carry in too many items at one time, customs agents can confiscate them, as happened once.While the Brazilians learn about the business of art, Doran learns about the art of finance.

So far, she and other Fairloom volunteers have been bringing the items here for sale at craft fairs, in boutiques and online. Some of the sales revenues, along with donated money, is sent to the Brazilians, the rest goes to financing Fairloom’s operations here.

Doran didn’t take a salary for two years. “We operate on a shoestring,” she said.Restrictions on money transfers put in place after Sept. 11, 2001, made the paperwork cumbersome, but creating a Brazilian nonprofit counterpart helped smooth it out.

Fairloom began a capital campaign over the summer, with the goal of raising $350,000 by the end of 2009. It started off with a $10,000 challenge grant and a fundraising dinner in Tiverton.

A Brazilian lace-maker working on her own might make about $20 a month, Doran said, with professionals making between $180 and $190 a month. The goal over the next five years is to build up the Brazilians’ incomes beyond that higher level.She projects that about 80 percent of Fairloom’s expenses will come from the sale of its products by the end of the five years.

“Slowly, as time goes on, they’re becoming more responsible for the business aspects of it,” Doran said. “The goal is to work me out of a job.”

To reach Fairloom, call (508) 264-2729, or to view its products, visit www.fairloom.org

pgrimald@projo.com