INDIANAPOLIS — At People for Urban Progress, one man's trash is another man's bag?
"We're excited to launch our new line of backpacks and a T-shirt as part of the Ignitor line," said Turae Dabney, executive director for PUP. "It is made of repurposed pool covers."
The pool covers were originally part of what would have been the spring collection, but PUP pivoted to making face masks during the COVID-19 pandemic.
"But then, the awakening of America's soul happened and of course, in true PUP fashion, we were trying to figure out, 'how can we use our foundation, our platform to be able to answer the call that many organizations were answering at that time?'' Dabney said.
The goal of the Ignitor line is to uplift minority designers in Indianapolis like Byron Elliot, the founder of Black Sheep Collective, who designed the Ignitor T-shirt.
"A lot of the artwork that I do on a daily basis is socially, empathetically-driven stuff," Elliot said. "I kind of have a heart for this, this subject."
He said the idea behind the shirt design is love.
"We have two people from two different backgrounds, two different ethnicities sharing love, trying to form love or speak to love, and then we have the Indianapolis flag in the middle," Elliot said.
They said part of the Ignitor line is about lifting minority designers locally and helping them get a seat at the table.
"One of the things that we've done when we decided to launch this line was to tap into the resource of a minority to help design our T-shirts," Dabney said. "And then, the second thing is the money. The proceeds from the line are going to seed the fellowship, and this fellowship will allow minority designers to use our platform at PUP to ignite their designs, to give them a bigger platform for their design and for their design work."
They said you can help their mission by supporting Black businesses.
"We can talk, and we can have conversations — those are very important. I never want to downplay that, conversation is great," Elliot said. "But action is just another level above conversation. You know, by buying a shirt, or buying a bag or whatever the case may be, it is you physically showing that you believe in what's happening."