Grant Applicant: The Fashion Foundation

The feature below is brought to you by The Fashion Foundation, an organization that is in the running to receive a See Beautiful Grant. For more information about all of our giving initiatives, please click here. 

To learn more about The Fashion Foundation, please visit their website: here.

Fashion Beyond Beautiful Design.

Remember when you were back in school and you got excited about shopping for a first day of school outfit and new school supplies to start the year? To me that was one of the best parts of attending school, but for many students in the U.S. that's not the case.

The Fashion Foundation has two parts, the fashion side and the education side. We work with the fashion industry to eliminate product waste by having designers donate any merchandise they no longer need.

Many fashion companies have product lying around their showrooms or warehouse that they don't know what to do with, and we've become the nonprofit to collect those pieces to put to good use!  We have saved over 10,000 pounds of merchandise from going into landfills and those pieces of merchandise are now funding children's education.

Funds from merchandise sales, donations, fundraisers and grants help us raise money to provide school supplies, art supplies, gym equipment and more to local underprivileged students who can't afford something as simple as a notebook or clean uniform to start their school day.

To date we have impacted over 6,000 students providing them with pencils, notebooks, uniforms, holiday gifts, gym equipment, books, art supplies and so much more. We have helped 14 schools throughout New York and work very closely with the school's staff to figure out what their students need before buying the supplies or tools.

For the past 5 years we have been providing students with the learning tools they need to succeed in their education but most recently we have taken on two very big projects. Last year we helped build a school library for a school in Brooklyn that didn't have a library filling it with over 800 brand new books.

When we hand a student a pencil, that's when we see beautiful.

Now, we're working on building a playground for a preschool in Harlem, New York. Right now this school playground is nothing but an outside concrete floor and brick wall. When the project is complete, it will have age-appropriate toys, picnic tables, slides, playhouses. The best part of all will be the giant hand-painted mural to take this from a drab, empty space to a beautiful, colorful playground.

We can already envision the hand-painted mural wrapped around the playground covering the red brick, toy houses lined up to create a mini village and picnic tables for the students to eat lunch, do art projects, or take a minute to rest from all the running around.

Isn't it a beautiful memory of yours running around the school playground with your friends? Happiness comes from within and when you're happy, aren't you more likely to see beautiful on the inside and outside? When we hand a student a new pencil that's when we see beautiful. A $.07 pencil can make a student's face light up and make their day brighter and maybe their entire school year brighter.

Can you imagine the smiles and laughter from student's for decades to come who will use this playground? We know this playground will put a smile on our student's faces and not only brighten up their play time, but also their beautiful life-long memories.

Written by:

Amanda Munz, Founder and President of the Fashion Foundation