After surviving a year and a half of homelessness in the early 1980s, Lucinda Yates moved back to Portland and started putting her life back together by waitressing.

But her true breakthrough came in August 1988, when she noticed some colorful mat boards in a frame shop's trash can. She pulled the discarded boards out of the garbage and started cutting them into elementary shapes, eventually creating a pin that looked like a house. Yates sold the pins to a local homeless shelter for $6, which in turn sold the pins for $10 to raise funds.

To date, Designs by Lucinda has sold more than 5 million pins, raising more than $25 million for thousands of nonprofits in the U.S. and globally.

(READ the story in the Huffington Post)