by Ainsley Hilliard Design: Natalia Jimenez
A
s you walk across campus on Wednesday afternoons, you’ve likely passed a tent filled with colorful clothes billowing in the wind or heard the shouts of “free clothes, UThrift!” If you walk up to the stand, you will find stylish tops, shoes, and accessories. All these items come from student donations through a club called UThrift. UThrift is a fairly new organization on campus that began in the fall of 2017 as a Student Government ECO Green Committee Initiative. It hosted its first pop-up in the spring of 2018 on United Nations Day, and quickly grew from there. In 2019, UThrift did everything from pop-ups and collaborations to workshops and clothing drives. This spring, UThrift received an organization designation from the Committee of Student Organizations. Its most recent event was the Swap and Strut fashion show, featuring no sew masks, DIY denim workshops, the standard clothing swap, and student models showing off their favorite thrifted items. But UThrift does more than provide an on campus thrift swap; it also hosts engagements with philanthropic organizations on and off campus, spending a day volunteering with the organization and learning about its mission. UThrift hosts at least one engagement a semester. Last spring, the club volunteered with the Miami Rescue Mission to help organize their store, fold clothes, and sort through donations. This past fall, UThrift hosted a collaboration with Lambda Theta Alpha and Lucha Latina to host a clothes drive for refugees and immigrants at the Lake Worth Center for the U.S. Committee for Refugees and Immigrants. The event was a raging success, bringing in over a hundred donations for families at the facility.
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What are clothes made of?
“Globally, we consume 80 million new pieces of clothing a year, 400% more than we consumed twenty years ago.”