“Accountability is usually what’s missing,” Whitney McGuire, the cofounder of Sustainable Brooklyn, explains. Along with organizing educational events and community programs in Brooklyn, she and her partner Dominique Drakeford consult brands and designers on their environmental and social efforts—and point out where there’s room to improve. Past clients and event partners include Eileen Fisher, Apple, Mara Hoffman, and ReFashion Week New York, and McGuire and Drakeford have worked with Fibershed and Conscious Chatter on their internal infrastructures and systems. “We do prolific assessments to see how a brand is operating, what their internal infrastructure is, what their anti-racist framework is, and how they define sustainability,” Drakeford says. “Do they have a colonial consciousness in regards to how they approach justice within the scope of sustainability? That’s the reason we need ‘sustainability,’ because of how brands have been operating for all of these years. We ask them what books they’ve read on race relations, what podcasts they’ve listened to, which influencers they’ve worked with… We really get down to the juices and berries of how they think before we can even discuss action and implementation. We have to figure out what their limitations are, because accountability is going to be the foundation of how intentions are made, period.”
Article Link: https://www.vogue.com/article/end-of-greenwashing-accountability-in-fashion-sustainable-brooklyn