Emma Schafman

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).

Q: What is Phoenix’s mission statement?

A: Explore, empower, and create. The way that we center what we want to do with Phoenix is to end up creating not only an environment for students to feel that they have a space to highlight and show their passions with art, passion with design, giving them a platform to do so. But also, trying to represent sustainable clothing brands and demonstrating that you can be a sustainable business and make that impact on the world.

Q: What are the major goals of Phoenix?

A: We want to help students learn about fast fashion and become more conscious consumers and emphasize the importance of the arts and nonSTEM programs in public schools.

Q: What makes Phoenix sustainable?

A: All of our materials come from second hand sources. We have a partnership with Karma Trade, locally, and we get a lot of items of clothing from them that are donated or from their mass inventory. Not only are we able to focus on the issue of fast fashion but also on the issue of lack of quality of art education within local public schools.

Q: What is Phoenix’s ecological footprint?

A: We’ve saved 33,798 gallons of water, 325.65 kilograms of carbon emissions saved, and 44.3125 lbs recycled. We’re trying to see what our sustainability impact is, how to make a bigger impact and also encourage that idea that businesses and platforms can have that impact. ▪