Sew Powerful, an Auburn-based nonprofit organization working to combat extreme poverty through sewing and tailoring, received a record-breaking 8,512 purses in its annual campaign to distribute them to school girls in Zambia, Africa.

Volunteers from throughout the world have spent the past year sewing purses based on a free pattern available for download from the organization’s website, SewPowerful.org.

Jason and Cinnamon Miles, Sew Powerful co-founders, announced the campaign’s results on Facebook last week.

For the past five years, boxes of purses have begun to arriving at the Sew Powerful headquarters every October. The purses are then counted, bundled and shipped to Zambia, the organization explained.

In Lusaka, Zambia, Sew Powerful trains, hires and employs local women who sew feminine hygiene supplies, which along with underwear and soap, are inserted in each of the lovingly-crafted purses. School girls in Zambia then attend a health class where they learn to use the hygiene supplies and take a pledge to stay in school in exchange for receiving one of the coveted purses, the organization said.

In Zambia, before the program started, girls typically missed 25 percent of the school year and found themselves at an academic disadvantage compared to their male counterparts, according to Sew Powerful. After missing so much schooling, the girls more frequently failed their seventh-grade exams. If that happened, their education came to an abrupt halt. In a country where nearly one-third of all children have lost a parent to the AIDS epidemic, education provides hope for a brighter future and an escape from the extreme poverty besieging so many Zambians, Sew Powerful said.

Sew Powerful, founded in 2010 by the Miles, is an entirely volunteer organization, including a global group of volunteers who sew purses each year.

This is the fifth year Sew Powerful has held its purse campaign to empower the school girls of Zambia. The numbers of purses submitted keeps growing from just 503 collected in 2014 to more 8500 collected so far this year, the nonprofit said.

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