Since 2011 we have worked through education, research and direct action to manifest regenerative alternatives to the dominant model of overproduction and overconsumption in the fashion industry. While this is a global challenge, we believe that a place-based approach, tethered to local accountability, is essential. Today, through our base in Accra, Ghana, we are at the forefront of catalyzing a Justice-led Circular Economy in solidarity with Kantamanto, the largest secondhand clothing market in the world.
ACTIVE WORK
TIDE TURNERS CLEANUP TEAM
2023 - Present | ACTIVE
Working in partnership with the waste management department of the Accra Metropolitan Assembly and other community cleanup groups, we are removing and hauling away over 18 tons of textile and other plastic waste from Accra's beaches every week. Our paid weekly cleanup team brings together more than 50 people in addition to activating local and international volunteers.
KANTA KEEPERS MARKET COLLECTIVE
2022 - Present | ACTIVE
Our Community Engagement team works across the many Kantamanto Market leadership groups that govern different sections of the market to organize and pay a team of more than 30 individuals working as waste collectors within the market to separate and collect textile waste from throughout Kantamanto Market. The waste collection team, dubbed the Kanta Keepers, then loads a municipal waste truck that we operate in partnership with the Accra Metropolitan Assembly in order to haul the textile waste to a sanctioned dumpsite far from the coastline.
SECONDHAND SOLIDARITY FUND
2020 - Present | ACTIVE
The Secondhand Solidarity Fund helps the Kantamanto Market community shift out of the crisis mode of daily survival and into long-range planning mode for transformation. From distributing direct relief funds to retailers and upcyclers after market fires and floods, to supporting community-identified vital needs, such as basic fire safety equipment and training, our Community Engagement team leads the effort to distribute hundreds of thousands of dollars through the fund, along with hundreds of fire extinguishers and other in-kind support.
THE MABILGU PROGRAMS
2021 - Present | ACTIVE
In Kantamanto 55kg clothing bales are headcarried by young women working as kayayei, meaning ‘she who carries the burden.’ Our year-long chiropractic study found that women working as kayayei suffer irreversible harm to their spinal column. In response to this, we created a holistic, paid apprenticeship program to foster alternative pathways for young women outside of dangerous headcarrying. In addition to apprenticeships we also offer wraparound support to the women in our Mabilgu Program, which mean sisterhood in the Dagbani language.
ECOLOGICAL RESEARCH & REMEDIATION TEAM
2021 - Present | ACTIVE
We organize citizen scientists to perform weekly beach monitoring reports, tracking textile tentacles across a seven kilometer swath of Accra’s beaches. Building on these findings we conduct weekly water and air sampling analysis along with regular passive air pollution monitoring in order to track the flow of waste pollution across the coastal environment. Through our first-of-its-kind solar powered research vessel, we will soon expand this monitoring and mapping effort off of the coastline and into the Gulf of Guinea.
MATERIAL RESEARCH & DEVELOPMENT
2021 - Present | ACTIVE
We have developed the methodology and community infrastructure to collect, sort, transport, store and process industrial scale quantities of clothing waste along the waste hierarchy of most efficient use. In addition we are pushing forward product development toward commercialization of multiple material transformation pathways based within the Kantamanto Market ecosytem. Our waste transformation machinery is designed and made locally using predominately scrap material.
COMMUNITY BUSINESS INCUBATOR
2022 - Present | ACTIVE
Our Community Business Incubator provides business development support for existing upcycling and resale businesses within the Kantamanto Market ecosystem as well as for our internally developed product lines as we strive to implement cooperative business models. With a curriculum on financial planning, marketing, customer engagement and quality control, we aim to bridge Kantamanto with new audiences both in Ghana and internationally. We operate a store in Accra and and we offer catalytic seed funding to eligible program participants.
OBRONI WAWU OCTOBER
2022 - Present | ACTIVE
In October 2022 we launched Obroni Wawu October as an annual festival dedicated to celebrating Kantamanto. Obroni Wawu October is led by our Community Engagement and Community Business Incubator (CBI) teams in close partnership with Kantamanto Market leadership groups and associations to celebrate Ghana’s legacy of sustainability and also to build solidarity with other secondhand markets across the Global South. Vogue Business described OWO as a model for the fashion industry.
STOP WASTE COLONIALISM
2022 - Present | ACTIVE
Our Stop Waste Colonialism campaign has established a new precedent for Extended Producer Responsibility, one that does not simply offset the cost of waste management within a linear economy but rather that funds the transition to true circularity. Grounded in self-representation and extensive research, we are advocating for textile-based Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) programs across the world to be Globally Accountable. Our campaign centers around a policy paper with more than 10,000 endorsements.
SPEAK VOLUMES
2023 - Present | ACTIVE
As a key element of our Stop Waste Colonialism campaign, Speak Volumes is a call for transparency & accountability on the one datapoint that impacts everyone along the value chain – production volumes. The Or Foundation has organized a call across the industry to make the publication of production volumes an industry standard.
COLLECTOFUS 2.0
2020 - Present | ACTIVE
Building on our roots in peer education, Collectofus 2.0 uses social media connections to engage emerging designers in a peer-based, object-exchange curriculum focused on removing marketing from the designer-to-consumer relationship, rethinking sustainability rhetoric and researching the accessibility of bespoke tailoring services. Designers are offered micro-grants to make a bespoke garment for a stranger on the internet using garment co-construction as a vehicle for sustainable relationships, learning and financial literacy.
PREVIOUS WORK
AGBETSI LIVING WATER SWIM FOR SCIENCE EXPEDITION
2023 | INACTIVE
Imagine a future where the beach is clean and the waters clear, where fishing nets catch fish, and not trash, where the Korle Lagoon is swimmable again. With the stage set by decades of Waste Colonialism and centuries of exploitative global trade, we launched a 40-day swimming expedition of the Volta River System, which gives life to millions of people in Ghana and throughout West Africa, in order to will this future into existence one stroke at a time through a public campaign, scientific research and environmental storytelling along the way.
KAYAYEI CHIROPRACTIC RESEARCH
INACTIVE
While women working as Kayayei (female head carriers) are currently vital to the flow of goods in Kantamanto Market, the conditions that most women and girls working as head carriers face within Accra’s markets can make their job deadly. We examined the causes, conditions and effects of the Kayayei trade and working with an Accra-based chiropractor to study the physiological impact of headcarrying in order to develop remedies across policy frameworks, infrastructure design and cultural appeals.
OUR LONG RECOVERY
2020 - 2022 | INACTIVE
With an array of partners, we conduct research, advocacy and community engagement work around the environmental, socio-cultural and economic impacts of fashion’s waste crisis in order to manifest tangible interventions to clean up the mess and to break the exploitative patterns of the colonial legacy embedded within the secondhand trade. As key elements of this work our Beach Monitoring Team tracks ocean textiles along Accra’s coast and we coordinate with waste pickers at area dumpsites to platform voices from the frontlines of circularity.
DEAD WHITE MAN'S CLOTHES
2016 - 2022 | INACTIVE
An immersive, multimedia research project into Accra, Ghana's Kantamanto Secondhand Clothing Market as both a global model for circularity and a manifestation of global injustice. Conducted to inform individual actions and policy frameworks, and to serve as a platform for community organizing
SUSTAINABLE FASHION INITIATIVE
2018 - 2022 | INACTIVE
In partnership with the University of Cincinnati’s School of Design, SFI represents a coalition of students and professionals working to develop a hyper-localized circular economy and to educate on sustainability and social inequality. SFI has reduced the textile waste from UC’s fashion design program by 70%, and is assisting local businesses to do the same. SFI hosts clothing swaps, mending circles, panels and workshops. SFI has published extensive research on unpaid internships and has supported the development of an anti-racism curriculum.
ALLSIX
2016 - 2019 | INACTIVE
Fashion’s impact can be difficult to understand, let alone measure. At the same time we put clothing on our bodies every single day. What can we learn from tracking our daily usage of clothing? What questions arise when we gather information from our own closets? AllSix is a platform and app that invites users to begin every day with an acknowledgment of their garments history and their patterns as a wearer
FOR THEIR MEMORY
2017 | INACTIVE
Inspired by the words of Rana Plaza survivor Reba Sikder, For Their Memory is a music video and fundraising project honoring the 1,138 people who died in the tragic collapse of the Rana Plaza fashion factory and the other countless lives lost to the violence of overproduction and overconsumption.
COLLECTOFUS GLOBAL LEADERS
2011 - 2016 | INACTIVE
An object-based exchange initiative that disrupts common notions of globalized trade. Grounded in the tangible experience of making & receiving an item of clothing from their peers abroad, students compare this method of connection with the dominant model of trade. Collectofus culminates in student-led design justice projects that have included dye gardens, redesigning school apparel and building solar charging stations. Collectofus has engaged over 20 partner institutions and 1,500+ students
MINIMAKERS
2012 - 2015 | INACTIVE
Students engage with the realities of their local thrift store and donation system. Tasked with taking garments that were donated in undignified condition and transforming them into clothing that bring joy to the wearer, students learn to sew, dye and construct clothing with purpose while also thinking critically about the dominant narrative surrounding clothing poverty. Hundreds of students across the USA have participated in Minimakers.
NOT JUST SOCCER 2.0
2015 | INACTIVE
Fostering a social guidebook and resilient community support systems through sport, this project updated an innovative community game in Mabatlane, or Vaalwater, Limpopo, South Africa through the Waterberg Welfare Society.
THESE THINGS TAKE TIME
2011 - 2016 | INACTIVE
A year-long interdisciplinary curriculum for K-12 students exploring colonization and globalization through the lens of the fashion industry – past, present and speculative. Grounded in the study of their own closets, the curriculum teaches students how to “read objects” as part of a larger mission to “read the world” – a mission inspired by Paulo Freire’s decolonizing pedagogy. This curriculum has been incorporated into over 20 educational institutions across the USA, Ghana and South Africa.
THE AFUTU PROJECT
2011 - 2012 | INACTIVE
Students are invited to recycle their single-use tees, and other garments, into backpacks in collaboration with Ghanaian seamstresses and tailors. The backpacks were priced by students to reflect their valorization matrix and sold to benefit an organization of their choice
(SUSTAINABLE) FASHION'S NIGHT OUT
2011 | INACTIVE
Produced in Partnership with Manhattan’s Textile Arts Center, the NYC Fair Trade Coalition and EcoSalon, the first ever (Sustainable) Fashion’s Night Out and LookBook featured fair trade, upcycled and slowly crafted garments, and asked the evening's guests to engage beyond the price tag.
