For a great number of people, crafts and arts are used to develop one's artistic capabilities and to serve as a hobby when there's nothing else to do. For some others, however, the arts and crafts also becomes a venue by which they may be able to touch the lives of other people. For some of them, it also becomes a source of income.
I've seen a lot of these charity arts and crafts workshops. Most of them are charities that make a number of handicrafts good, whose sales are donated to some impoverished groups abroad or needy people in their own place. They're pretty common and vary when it comes to the crafts sold and the extent by which they help people. Some of them do not even sell their goods. They just give the crafts to a specific group of people, who may be undergoing some serious illness or depression, to provide some sort of relief.
One of them is Afghans for Angels, a group of women who lovingly create hand-made baby afghans or caps that are donated to hospitals in the US and Canada and given to women who have lost their children to miscarriage, stillbirth, neonatal death, or termination due to poor parental diagnosis. The baby caps won't absolutely pull these supposed-to-be-mothers from the depression of losing a child, but they go a long way to sharing compassion and sympathy to the people who need it the most.
One does not even have to have this kind of noble goal to touch people. In my opinion, it is already a good gesture to teach people the spirit of creating crafts, even it involves a small pay from another group of people. Instead of selling crafts, some people just teach how to make them, which is good enough for me already. In my opinion, it already takes a lot to share knowledge with someone else. Monetary compensation is just a small bonus added to it.
