Atherton’s Environmental Club recently designed a fashionable feature for a good cause. This Friday, the Environmental Club hosted a clothing swap. Ms. New, the club’s sponsor, explains how things began.

“This club started in 2019 right before covid. A senior student asked me to be the sponsor of this club that she wanted to start,” Ms. New said. “The club is a student-run organization. The officers plan the events and activities. I have been super lucky to always have highly motivated officers that plan everything.”

Senior Class President Wesley Buchanan, leading the Environmental Club as Co-President this year, describes their bi-annual clothing swap.

“People bring clothes that are used, too small, or they don’t wear anymore to donate to other students at the school. Then everyone comes in and the room is set up like a goodwill with clothes everywhere and everyone can take whatever they want,” Buchanan said.

Thanks to the generosity of local students, donations always come in abundance, but most interestingly is their style of exchange, organized in imitation of the thrift store model reflective of the increasingly popular in imitation of the thrift store model, these clothes swaps attract greater turnouts as more students shop second-hand.

“Doing things like the clothes swap allows for less clothes to end up in landfills,” Buchanan said.“Lots of people throw away clothes that are torn or messed up slightly, however many people use this fabric to make more clothes. Just because something isn’t able to be used in its original way doesn’t mean that it can’t be used in a different one.”

Atherton’s school culture has welcomed this invitation, as DIY, upcycling, and handmade crafts are all seen as fashionable aspects of artistic and personal expression, contributing to the appeal of buying secondhand. The school community has embraced the event in recent years, consistently boasting higher turnouts. This aligns exactly with the mission statement of the Environmental Club, to spread awareness, especially to young people, about environmental issues that affect them and their local community.

“Environmental club hosts it because the point is to reduce fast fashion. We want to be able to reuse clothes because something that is old and maybe not your style anymore might be just the piece that someone else was looking for,” Buchanan said. “Also it’s great because whatever clothes are left over we get to donate to JCPS so we get to help kids from all across the county.”

The ability of the Atherton students organizing events like this recent clothing swap ability to bring awareness to their cause while helping clothe their neighbors remains striking. However, the regular students that showed up in groups to participate prove that maybe the generation we’re handing the planet off to will handle it with a little more care.

“I’ve always believed that environmental stewardship is one of the most meaningful responsibilities we can model for young people,” Ms. New said. “Their passion makes the work feel purposeful, and being able to help them turn their ideas into real projects that benefit the school community and the environment is something I genuinely value.”