BEAUTY & FASHION
Phoenix An interview with PM Alisha Alam Written by Emma Schafman Photographed by Dylan Murphy Q: What is Phoenix? A: Phoenix is an awareness based clothing brand that is run by high school students locally in the Champaign-Urbana area. We provide these students a platform to highlight their own fashion design interests and passions through a sustainable project. From the items they create, they are able to turn that into a business and make money from it. Q: What is Illinois Enactus? A: It’s a non-profit student organization on campus defined as a social entrepreneurship organization. There are 9 projects within Enactus’s portfolio. There are people based projects like Phoenix, service based projects, and technological projects. Q: How did Phoenix start? What inspired its creation? A: It was a capstone project. Enactus looks at the community and creates a needs assessment. For Phoenix, they wanted to work with students locally with something in the arts department. Q: What do you teach the kids within the program? A: Soft and hard skills for students that usually are lacking in public schools like how to sew, create clothes, and how to create portfolios for college.
Center photo from left to right: Jacob Swiney (PA - Project Associate), Alexa Smith (PA), Alisha Alam (PM - Project Manager), Ziyan Chen (PA), and Amartya Bhattacharya (PA).
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