About ReGo

The ReGo Collective’s Purpose

The ReGo Collective uses fashion activism and transformational mindset coaching with the aim to empower young people and illustrate that they have a choice in shaping their lives to be more purposeful, showing that young people must be part of the solution to wider social issues. Adopting a fashion activism approach and mindset coaching, the ReGo Collective delivers youth-led creative activities as a positive and transformative outlet for young people to build resilience and agency, gain new skills, develop employability, and become catalysts for social change.

How Does the ReGo Collective Work?

We run activities which include:

• Mindset coaching sessions and mentoring to enable young people to ‘go inside’ and begin to design or re-design who we feel we are and how we feel we need to be in order to effect the changes we want to engender.
• Training for young people to become workshop facilitators and deliver creative activities in schools, youth clubs, and community centres.
• A programme of creative workshops on fashion design, media and entrepreneurship tailored to the needs and aspirations of young people and school or College
  students.

The ReGo Collective’s Outputs and Outcomes

Outputs

• A public engagement event (consisting of a panel debate, film screening, a music performance, and exhibition of the project o utputs) was delivered in May 2022. To accompany the exhibition, and to launch the fashion collection, the team collaborated with creative street advertising specia lists JACK, part of BUILDHOLLYWOOD, across sites in East London, showcasing an exclusive photoshoot starring the young people involved in the project.
• The ReGo fashion collection is available to rent via LOANHOOD, the innovative rental platform offering a sustainable and accessible way to refresh wardrobes and wear unique high-end items that people might not otherwise have has access to. All proceeds raised will go towards supporting on-going educational and employment opportunities for young people in fashion.
• ReGo was one of the finalists of the Green Gown Awards 2022, under the ‘Benefitting Society’ category. This achievement recognizes that significant benefits to society can be generated when we trust, nurture, and support young people, and involve them in local activities. The ReGo Collective can be considered as a micro- site of activism, but it also contributes to fostering macro-changes in society and in people’s perceptions of the fashion system.
• Members of the ReGo Collective collaborated with East-London based sustainable fashion brand BEEN London to design zippers for a limited-edition collection of recycled leather pouches. The zippers were made from discarded knives taken off London streets by KnifeSafe. Profits from sa les went back into supporting on-going initiatives with East London youth.

Outcomes

The ReGo Collective has already made multiple diverse contributions to the locality, and to the situated issue of violence between young people. As a result of their engagement in the activities, the participants felt connected with a community of support and built confidence to work on their goals. The ReGo Collective also contributes to University of the Arts London’s place-making activities and social purpose, helping to realise the vision of Fashion District to make East London a place where people and businesses can thrive, through fashion, sustainability, and innovation.

The ReGo Collective demonstrates how design operates within a cultural context and provides room for relational engagements a nd strategic experimentation. It illustrates the power of fashion to shape better lives, and shows how culture, creativity and collaboration can play a crucial part in tackling some of the most challenging issues facing society. Putting young people at the heart of the creative project has enabled them to influence the shape of the project, leading to meaningful connections and lasting impacts.

The ReGo Collective co-creates knowledge as well as products with young people and youth workers, to make a difference in local communities, and to increase relational networks. Building on the experience of the young people, new skills, relationships, and opportunities are generated. The potential focus of such a fashion activist initiative as well as its creative network, skills and techniques are numerous and scalable and offer further opportunities for incremental knowledge exchange.

Where is ReGo Collective Going?

ReGo collective’s long-term vision is:

• To be registered as a social enterprise to be run by young people who have been a part of the ReGo Collective’s journey.
• To collaborate with other brands from small to large to support further skills training, employability, and co-creation of a larger fashion collection.
• To rent or sell ReGo products in order to raise funding to support further youth-led fashion activism interventions.
• To gradually expand at national and even international level as a creative campaign led by young people, with fashion activism for social change at its core.