Green up the World with Grass Routes!

It all started a few years ago. Cecilia came across the difficulties to find fair trade shirts for fair prices, and so we started investigating. We got excited of how many projects actually exist, and just wondered why we knew so little about it. Why did we actually still shop most of our clothes at stores that we knew were selling us made-in-sweatshops kind of stuff?

We got more and more into the issue of sustainable clothing, and the past two years, the topic took a run, hundreds of new websites and brands saw the light, and media stayed issuing the “new cool eco fashion trend”.

Meanwhile we traveled to Turkey and Africa last year to visit organic cotton farms and factories, we discovered all about the disastrous impacts of regular cotton production, and realized there is no fair clothing possible without banning these poisonous practices.

Green up Fashion

We organized an event on Fair Fashion in Berlin, launched the Open Source clothing label Pamoyo and founded the Grass Routes Foundation to be able to kick-start more activities. Now we’re in the stage of breakthrough, opening an office in Berlin at the start of 2009 and forming a team and preparing for some new exciting projects, a Sustainable Fashion Agency, a new Fair Fashion event, and international awareness campaigns.

Yeah, once up on a time we were those activists reading No Logo, believing the public sphere was a street art battleground to reclaim our culture and fight commercialism with creativity. Since street art became marketing, adbusting branding and creativity industry, we shifted our tactics.

The New Green Movement

Now we find ourselves back as part of a new green movement, a worldwide network of thousands of initiatives like us, connected through online communities, blogs and personal contacts, forcing global change and a mind shift to save our precious planet and nature, and if you want: civilization.

We are working on great new projects to make the world go greener. We raise awareness for environmental and social impacts of the fashion industry and supporting sustainable alternatives and we are kick starting international campaigns to promote a greener way of living.

We do this because we believe we have to make a global shift towards a more green, more conscious way of living, working, producing, and consuming. And we do this with an open mind, humor and creativity. We don’t know if it’s enough, we even don’t always know if we’re doing the right thing. But what else can we do than to do the things that we can do?

We’re happy with your comments, your feedback, your involvement and your support. It will keep us on track and help us kick starting all the stuff we do. Please spread the word about us!

For the bloggers among you: feel very free to ad us to your blogroll and if you like to subscribe to our RSS Feed.

Thanks a lot!!!

Frans Prins & Cecilia Palmer

Grass Routes Foundation