CONNIE DUCKWORTH (right) pays her Afghani weavers a premium in exchange for their promise to take literacy classes and send their children to school.

"This is such a different environment from the finance world that I’m used to," says Duckworth, 51, who is sometimes given to understatement. "I’d never been in a helicopter before, and I’m sitting in an open sling with a guy next to me in full body armor holding a machine gun. It’s so fascinating, you kind of forget about fear. You get caught up in the moment."

The world of Manhattan design showrooms was also unfamiliar to her until she launched a business that imports rugs handwoven by Afghani women. But today, Duckworth discusses the minutia of vegetable dyes and tribal elk-and-horseman patterns with architects and interior designers. She is well known in philanthropic circles as the former Goldman Sachs partner now spearheading a social entrepreneurship venture that she calls Arzu, the Dari word for "hope." If the idea succeeds, it will be thanks to her ability to create excitement in fashionable circles around a rug business that, as she is always quick to point out, can make it possible for the weavers and their children to earn a living and go to school.

Duckworth started at the bottom of the cliquey, mercurial interior furnishings trade. She solicits friends and friends of friends to form a coterie of what she calls "brand ambassadors"—design industry insiders who talk up Arzu rugs to other designers. She also hosts events, including one at the Baldwin Gallery in Aspen last July, where she sold $40,000 worth of rugs. She plans gatherings this fall in Denver, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle, Las Vegas, Miami and London.

Peripatetic Prospector
Duckworth’s upbringing was nomadic enough to teach her to go where prospects beckoned. Her father was a hospital administrator in the Army Medical Corps who moved the family around before settling in Texas. She graduated from the University of Texas, then earned an MBA at Wharton, but had her eye on California. "I thought it was a land of opportunity, for women in particular," she says. There she met her husband, Tom, and began working in fixed-income sales for Goldman Sachs, first in Los Angeles, and later in Chicago. By 1997, when the firm transferred her to New York to co-head the municipal bond department, the Duckworths had four children. Rather than move the family, she spent the next four years leaving Chicago on Monday mornings and flying back on Friday nights.

She retired from finance in late 2001, during a period of post-9/11 reckonings. But Duckworth had been appalled by the Taliban’s atrocities against women before they were front-page news. She had long been a proponent of female-friendly working conditions at Goldman Sachs and was active in the Committee of 200, a group of women business leaders. "After 9/11, there was a groundswell of interest among women in Committee of 200 to help the women of Afghanistan," she says.

When President Bush and President Hamid Karzai established the U.S.-Afghan Women’s Council with a combination of public and private funds, Duckworth joined. She embarked on her first visit in 2003. None of her work on behalf of corporate women in the U.S. prepared her for the suffering she saw. She learned the average Afghan woman will have eight pregnancies and has a life expectancy of 40 years. She came away determined to create opportunities for women to work and attend school.

There was no shortage of women with the skills to weave rugs with traditional tribal and Persian motifs, but they needed yarns, dyes and looms, as well as distribution channels. "These people are living at a below-subsistence level," Duckworth says. "A small thing can literally change their life." She underwrote Arzu’s start-up costs herself; she had the promise of a grant from the U.S. Agency for International Development, but it took a year to arrive. The grant has since been renewed twice, providing a total of $2 million, and Duckworth has raised capital from private individuals and private foundations, including Beyond the 11th, a foundation started by two 9/11 widows with a mission to assist widows in Afghanistan.