Accessible UNITY (UNITY Charity Fashion Show)

UNITY Charity Fashion Show has been contributing to the Northwestern community for over twelve years, hosting a charity fashion show each spring, which showcases the diverse and incredible talents of our student body in the forms of dance, music, fashion design, modeling and voice. We aim to provide an outlet for students at Northwestern and in the greater Chicago area, to showcase their love of fashion, style, and creativity while supporting a worthy cause.

The purpose of the UNITY Fashion Show is to celebrate fashion, diversity, and philanthropy.  In order to achieve this vision, we seek funding for attendee transportation, a design competition, and other small administrative costs.

UNITY Charity Fashion Show creates endless possibilities, but, of course, this year we aim to go bigger and better, and a large aspect of that requires accessibility. We seek to raise funding through Catalyzer so we can transport all UNITY attendees to our fashion show.  We want to ensure that everyone can attend our event despite financial barriers. Because Northwestern’s student government does not fund transportation costs, we must seek other avenues for funding.

In order for UNITY to rightfully support the aims of our beneficiary, we must acknowledge the differences between our two communities. Northwestern, from an objective perspective, is inaccessible to many. We are privileged to attend a private and widely-acknowledged prestigious institution, however, many who also attend our school face many challenges, both financial and otherwise, to receiving the same opportunities as others inside this community. In order to wholeheartedly show the CPS community as well as our own Northwestern community that Northwestern supports both their own students' efforts in UNITY's philanthropic endeavor, as well as the students and general population of the CPS community, we must be able to host our event in a neutral location and ensure total accessibility for all those who wish to attend or participate.

The primary problem with this initiative that we have been facing, both this year and last, is that transportation for our members to and from our amazing downtown Chicago location requires significant time and money for all involved. Because ASG does not fund transportation, we have had to rely on the generosity of our attendees to provide their own transportation to and from the venue. This unfortunately costs a significant amount of money that we do not want our attendees to be burdened with, especially because it prevents NU students to have access to the only platform for fashion design and runway modeling that the university offers.

Last year, we worked with SocialWorks to organize a design competition for Chicago Public School students. The winning five designs were printed on Champion sweatshirts, and we sold them in Northwestern bookstores. This year, we hope to bring the design competition to Northwestern’s campus in order to inspire designers on our campus. We want to work closely with two Northwestern designers and have their designs printed on sweatshirts to be sold on Northwestern’s campus.

The final component of our project is to fund some administrative costs. If we successfully fundraise transportation for attendees, and a design competition, we will need money for promotional materials, such as flyers and signs, to publicize our events. We also need to purchase clothing racks for the show, which will be owned by the student organization.