Every WANLI piece starts in the same place: with a family, a herd, and a winter that reaches forty below.
The herders are not suppliers in the abstract. They are the reason the fibre exists at all, and the hardest years on the steppe are getting harder: dzud winters that take whole herds, feed that runs short, children boarding far from the winter pasture for school.
So the arrangement is simple. One percent of every sale, not every profit, every sale, returns to the steppe. The herder cooperatives we buy from decide what it funds, because they know better than we do. So far the list looks like this: veterinary care for the herds, winter feed reserves for the hard years, and school support for herder children boarding in the aimag centres.
Once a year we publish what was paid, where it went, and what it did, here in the Journal. The first full report follows the first full year of the relaunch.
It is not charity, and we do not want credit for it. It is the supply chain paying its respects to the people at the start of it.
