Transformational Leadership Blog

The youth are truly making important changes in the world today! Just ask 16-year old Carmina Mancenon, a Filipina who’s studying and living in Japan. She started Stitch Tomorrow, a youth-led fashion microfinance initiative that seeks to use fashion in solving the pressing problems of poverty, climate change, education and youth engagement in world affairs.

According to the Stitch Tomorrow website, “the idea behind it is to use fashion to bridge the gap between the privileged and underprivileged youth. The privileged youth can use Stitch Tomorrow to channel their energy and love for fashion to help their underprivileged peers.”

Through Carmina Mancenon’s leadership, Stitch Tomorrow will help teens create their own fashion lines by using second-hand materials. This way, they will be able to pull themselves out of poverty and contribute to environmental conservation the same time!

This is a creative way of helping change the world. Carmina certainly knows how to speak the language of her generation and use their interests to get them involved in making important changes in the world. According to Carmina, “I think taking people’s interest and using it in a good way is how you can get them involved and how they want to be involved… Ultimately, what I hope to achieve is to create fashion lines that involve all youth. (Interacting with local youth) indirectly gets privileged kids interested in social issues.”
She also collaborates with a counterpart in Australia. They have already created some experimental clothes from materials they found in a dumpsite from Jakarta, Indonesia. Interestingly, when they posted the clothes in Facebook, a lot of people expressed interest in ordering and getting those clothes.

Carmina Mancenon has been noticed by the world lately with her participation in the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland where she shared her ideas to the participants of the WEF. She was one of the six young social entrepreneurs chosen from more than 1,200 applicants from 44 countries by Global Changemakers, which is being run by the British Council.
JapanTimes ran a story on Carmina on February 13, 2010. Here’s an excerpt from that article:

“Mancenon became aware of social issues, especially poverty in developing countries, at a very young age. Having been raised in Tokyo due to her father’s engineering job, she was shocked to move back to the Philippines and witness the disparity. “I was being exposed to a really vibrant, clean and developed city. I was so used to the lifestyle,” she recalls.

In the Philippines, she went to an international school, commuting by air-conditioned car. “I saw these kids, barefoot child beggars, just walking out there wanting money, and I was in the air-conditioned car. It was really uncomfortable,” she said. “It’s hard not to get involved when somebody is able to see poverty, not just in movies or books, but see it in real life.”
Mancenon returned to Tokyo at age 10 and when she turned 12, she started doing volunteer work, including helping a homeless shelter in the Ueno district. She also participated in an nongovernmental organization that helps build homes in developing countries, and traveled to Thailand to actually build one with other Japanese students.”

Carmina Mancenon is a shining beacon of youth social entrepreneurship! She has started at a young age. With Stitch Tomorrow, she will certainly be able to make an impact in eradicating global poverty with youth power!

You can follow Carmina Mancenon via Twitter.

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Related posts:

1. An Interview with Carmina Mancenon
2. Jeff Skoll and the Changing Face of Philanthropy
3. How to Start a Social Entrepreneurship Organization