Girls in long dresses!

7th February 2018:

Closing the Charity Shop has given us an  opportunity to help some local communities. Most ball dresses we have got over the six years appear to have been a one night affair, but it looks like these dresses will get another chance.

Johanna on the left sent me this note:


Hi John,
 
How are you? Again many thanks for all the dresses you gave us yesterday. The girls love them. The project we're working on for the last weeks is called 'Passion for Fair Fashion'. We signed up for the Young Environmentalist Awards of Eco Unesco and we're hoping to win a prize with our project in May 2018.
 
Here some information about our project:
We are a group of 6 young women and after a 10 week Eco Choices programme with Eco Unesco we decided to do a project on clothes as we all love clothing and fashion but didn’t know much about the fashion industry. During a workshop around fair fashion we found out more about it and we watched a video about clothes making. We discovered that some people were not getting a fair pay and that making new clothes uses a lot of water, chemicals and energy. We also found out that the clothing industry have lots of people involved who make them at each stage and some don’t get much paid of their work at all. It’s seems to be very unfair as they have to work in horrible circumstances. And it  can be bad for climate change.
Our aim is to learn how to make our own clothes from scrap materials, as well as trying to help the environment. The dresses we got from Wells for Zoe are going to be made in something more wearable. We are doing this together with Caroline who is a professional dress maker and volunteering with Stoneybatter Youth Service.
In April/May we will launch the Passion for Fair Fashion exhibition to raise the awareness of the public what the impacts are of the fashion industry has on the environment. The exhibition will take place in the NWICN, Bi Urban and Stanhope Secondary school. We will inform you when it's on and we would be very happy if you could attend to see what we did with the dresses you gave us. 
 
If you have any questions please let us know. Thank you again for all your help and we would love to include the photo you have taken in the shop in our portfolio.
 
Kind regards,
 
Johanna Visser
Youth worker
Stoneybatter Youth Service