Last weekend we hosted a celebration to honor the graduates of our first ever Fashion the Future Forward program. A celebration was in order not only for all the hard work that they have put into the craft of sewing but also for pouring energy back into themselves over these last few months.
Supporting women-owned businesses is extremely important, especially those that are local to your own community. According to some estimates there are now 12.3 million woman-owned businesses in the US, and it is important to uplift them, remembering that women have only been able to take out their own business loan without a male cosigner since 1988 (Aeoworks.org)
As ideas around sustainable fashion have started to become more mainstream, many companies want to join the trend, without doing the work. A purchase from a sustainable brand is different from that from a regular brand: it is an agreement for the brand you are supporting to support certain values.
Five years ago, Grant Blvd was founded—not just as a company, but as a radical movement, using fashion as a social statement and a means to improve the situations of women in our community. Since our founding, we have created thousands of hours of living-wage work for women who have been negatively affected by the carceral system or unhoused. Our goal in creating these jobs is to disrupt the cycles of poverty to which these women have often been subjected.