Cape crusaders
1st Dec 2011
A really nice article from North Shore Outlook
Known for creating some of the most high-tech and costly outdoor gear on the market, this holiday season the designers at Arc’teryx Equipment are training their scissors and fabric pencils on making simple, emergency outerwear for those who can least afford it.
It’s the third year of what Arc’teryx staff have dubbed the Birds Nest Project, wherein employees of the North Van company volunteer their weekends to make rain gear for the homeless and those in need.
This Christmas season, Arc’teryx staff have designed and assembled Gore-Tex capes of varying colours to hand out for free at North Vancouver’s Harvest Project and at the Salvation Army Harbour Light centre in Vancouver's Downtown Eastside.
“The idea was first talked about by our Green Committee to deal with our excess fabric and not throw it in a landfill,” Birds Nest volunteer and Green Committee chair Joanne Mayzes told The Outlook.
They began by donating the hundreds of metres of end-of-roll fabric left over from the season’s product run to local design schools.
“But then we came up with an idea and a prototype,” Mayzes said.
The small band of volunteers took their initial cape idea to the Downtown Eastside for feedback, made the necessary adjustments, and then took it to the management who gave it the green light.
That was three years ago, and today the volunteer group of cape crusaders has expanded to 70 staff who donated their weekends at the company’s Burnaby garment factory to crank out the capes in time for winter.
One of those volunteers is Nancy Fedoruk, who, in a nice bit of reciprocity, was actually a design student at Kwantlen last year and used some of the donated Arc’teryx material in her final project before graduation. Now she’s a full-time pattern designer at Arc'teryx who signed up immediately for the capes-for-homeless initiative.
Fedoruk said she never expected to be designing clothing for the homeless when she got into fashion design at Kwantlen, but she’s happy to help.
“The main reason I like doing it is the opportunity to get out to the factory and work with everyone that I wouldn’t normally see,” she said.
When it began in 2009, the project was called Phoenix and it took volunteers more than an entire day to make their very first cape. That year they completed about 300 of the give-away garments.
Last year, they’d refined their manufacturing process and were able to make about 560 capes to give out in Vancouver and North Vancouver. This year, with further tweaking and streamlining in the assembly, volunteers made 705 capes over just three Sundays in October and November.
About 200 of those capes will be handed over this Friday to the Harvest Project in North Vancouver, while the rest will go to Harbour Light just before Christmas.
Harvest Project development officer Kevin Lee and executive director Gary Ansell said the local non-profit received a similar number of capes last year which disappeared out the door just as quickly as they came in.
“Within 10 days they were all given out,” Lee said. “There’s a bit of denial in West Vancouver that people have less than they need, but we see clients all the way from Squamish to Deep Cove.”
Most of those clients come in by appointment and if they appear to be living outside or are otherwise under-equipped for the wet weather, they will be offered a cape, Lee said. But walk-ins are always welcome at Harvest too and anyone who needs a warm, waterproof cape can come pick one up. Lee added that, with the number of homeless on the North Shore this year seemingly on par with last, they expect the free capes won’t be available for long.
For Mayzes, Fedoruk and Kristi Birnie, one of the founders of the capes program, the real payoff comes without warning on a wet winter day.
“I saw one of the capes being worn downtown last year,” Mayzes recalled. “We gave them out on Christmas Eve and a month and a half later I saw one.”
They agreed that for a company that grew out of the wealth of the North Shore, selling outerwear that retails for hundreds of dollars apiece, the opportunity to help people less fortunate while also helping the environment is a win-win.
And they hope other companies will follow suit.
“I’m hoping that it might incentivize other companies too to take a look at what they’re doing and what they’re throwing into the landfill and maybe get creative and think of what they might do otherwise with it,” Mayzes said. “And to be socially responsible and to get out there and help somebody who maybe doesn’t have all the luxuries we do.”
Birnie said that, for her, when the capes program was first getting off the ground, it hit especially close to home because her partner at the time was slipping into addiction and into the pull of the Downtown Eastside.
“You start to recognize that people drawn there aren’t there by choice,” she said, adding that it was also a time in her life when she felt increasingly compelled to volunteer to serve the needy abroad. “I thought, ‘why not help people in your own backyard?’”
The Gore-Tex capes are one-size-fits-all and come in an array of colours. About half of this year’s capes are insulated, half are not, and all are fastened with a drawstring and Velcro and can roll out into a blanket and pack up into an easy-to-carry bundle.
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