For my Action ePortfolio project, I decided to work alongside a classmate, Désirée Schmitt. Desi and I planned, advertised and hosted a clothing drive during the month of February – open to students as well as faculty. We were lucky to work closely with Cheryl Schreader who supported us from the inception of our idea to the day we carried out the clothing drive, nearly one month later.
The first step of carrying out our clothing drive was finding a couple days to host the event, as well as creating posters to put up around campus as an educational activism initiative within our project.
poster we created and shared as a part of the educational activism aspect of our project. 
poster we created and shared as a part of the educational activism aspect of our project.
I found the biggest challenge of this project pertained to the planning aspect, mostly centered around finding a day that worked for myself, Desi, Cheryl, that as well aligned with the availability of the space in the Cafeteria. Another difficulty we had not anticipated was finding non-profit organizations and textile recycling companies that would take the clothes we collected. The first textile company we came across and were in contact with looked amazing but upon further research, we noticed they ultimately sold textiles to countries in Eastern Europe and it was our intention to keep this project as close to non-profits as possible. After realizing it would difficult to decide on one specific organization before even gathering clothes to donate, we thought it would be best to first host the event, and then sift through everything and find specific organizations to donate to.
We were stationed in the Capilano University Birch Cafeteria on Thursday February 28th from 11:30am-1:00pm and again the next day, March 1st from 11:30am-1:00pm. We noticed that clothing donated came mostly from faculty rather than students.
After the event on Thursday and Friday, we took all the clothes to Desi’s house and went through everything, piece by piece. During this process we looked at every item and separated them into 6 categories; women’s work clothes, casual women’s clothes, kid’s clothes, casual men’s clothes, men’s work clothes and textile recycling.
We donated all the women’s casual clothes to the Downtown Eastside Women’s shelter, the kids clothes and casual men’s clothes to Big Brother, the women’s business clothes to Dress For Success, men’s business clothes to Working Gear and the items that were not donatable will be taken to a textile recycling facility at the North Shore transfer station.
What we learned and wanted to teach others by carrying out with action, is to be conscious of the effects of the textile industry on our planet, and what happens when we throw old, unwanted clothes in the trash, as opposed to donating it or recycling it. Overall, I believe this project was a huge success. We gathered lots of clothes, much of which will be donated and we managed to keep quite a bit of textiles out of the landfill, as well as educate our peers around the negative effects of throwing unwanted clothes out.