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Dear Friend,
2022 was a good year, as you’ll read in the full report. Custom Collaborative participants had lots of new experiences and opportunities, thanks to our partners and supporters. In April the first in-person training program since February 2020 began. The start of Cohort 9 in April was joyful and invigorating, and brought new challenges. The biggest challenge was recruitment: how to find the right people to join our Training Institute with much more limited in-person activity than in the past, and with so many people in our participant communities being targeted and influenced by anti-vaccine disinformation. Fortunately, we developed strategies (and patience) to get the right women through the doors. We hosted a COVID workshop with a family-medicine specialist, appeared on WPix-11 news to advertise our training, and doubled the number of open house sessions to share the opportunity. We ended up with a great class of participants, including Yun, TiAsia, and others, who are on the cover of this report.
Recognizing that so many things changed since the start of the pandemic, we responded with changes of our own. We’ve all been stressed (right?), so Custom Collaborative friend and professional Acupuncturist Soo Uhm provided wellness treatments for the class. Both Soo’s needling and mindfulness instruction, and Daryn Wilkerson’s illustration courses on Fridays relaxed and uplifted the students, giving them good energy to take home over the weekend.
I think that those healing interventions helped make the August 2022 Graduation Fashion Show so spectacular. I don’t want to ruin it for you before you turn the pages and see them for yourself, several designs that the graduates created were so spectacular that they were featured in a Vogue Business article about sustainability and inclusion. And the class had solid business plans too: by the end of the year, the participants were even hiring each other to work on projects!
Custom Collaborative partnered with the Child Center in Queens to develop a program that pays 20 of our program participants $200/monthly and provide them intermediate grants to support their futures. This is a great adjunct to the personal finance training that Custom Collaborative provides to all Training Institute students. This money will help women buy equipment and supplies, expand their marketing presence, or transform our participants' business and life opportunities in other ways.
Read on – great things are happening, thanks to you and the rest of the Custom Collaborative community.
With gratitude,
Ngozi
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