The aim is simple: to help people give back to their city through art.
McGill students Matt Dajer and D’Arcy Williams founded Heart City Apparel in the spring of 2014 after noticing the widespread homelessness that lives alongside amazing works of street art throughout Montreal. It began with contacting a prominent street artist, Waxhead, and now 9 artists are involved internationally. Whenever an item (printed with original art from these artists) is sold, 10% of sales are split between the designer and an organization of their choice.
All clothing is printed in Montreal, and Heart City Apparel currently ships to Canada, the U.S., Europe and South America. So far, approximately $1,865.91 has been raised for organizations aimed at making homelessness obsolete. Partners include Welcome Hall Mission, Dans la Rue, Eva’s Intitiatives, Chicago Coalition for the Homeless, Aunt Leah’s Place, and Salaam Baalak Trust.
Dajer and Williams met at a conference early on in their undergraduate degrees, and it was bro-love at first sight. These two have a lot in common: they both did a field study program in Africa, they both hold interest in international development and they both love helping people. If we needed to describe them in one hashtag, it would be #altruism.
We wanted to know what they thought about the struggles of trying to eliminate homelessness. “One of the big problems with dealing with homelessness is identifying with it. Not many McGill students know homeless people. So that’s a challenge, and a way to overcome that challenge is the goal of our marketing campaign, which is to humanize it. We’re trying to ask these people, as human beings, what it’s like to be them and to be living homeless. You can’t really make a difference until people understand it.”
When asked if there was one specific event that really made the creators say “woah, we’re doing something big here,” they had a great story. Alongside generally “good reactions,” Matt had a run-in (literally) with a jogger on a Montreal street.
“It was 11pm at night and I was wearing my Heart City sweater. A girl was running by me and she […] ran past me and then stopped, and yelled, “Wait!” so I turned around.
Then she asked, “Where did you get that sweater?”
I was like, “oh, this is Heart City. I like, started it and whatever.”
She said, “it’s so great, I love it.” […] It was so cool, in a way, to realize that the story stuck in people’s minds and that people actually remembered it. That’s crazy – to start something and have people care about it who you don’t even know.”
In terms of future plans for Heart City Apparel, Matt alluded to “some pretty freakin’ cool designs coming out from all over the world. […] In terms of bigger partnerships, we’re partnering with a YouTube Channel that interviews hip hop artists.” This was when D’Arcy jumped in, throwing his voice to our recorder and saying “Mark your calendars – January 10th we’re having a benefit concert for Dans la Rue at Petit Campus. The headliner is going to be Busty and the Bass, […] and the basic idea is that the whole week back from winter break we’re going to be holding a clothing drive. We will be collecting clothes to donate all day, and we’ll be selling coffee and doing our “whiteboard moments” (for examples of this check out www.facebook.com/heartcityapparel), and we’ll cap off the week with the concert on Saturday.”
Interested in helping out? “This [question] is easy. If you go to the bottom of our website, there is a section called “rep.” If you are a college rep, you become a brand ambassador. You get a discount code you can share with your friends, you invite people to like the page and in return they get put in the Heart City group, they get 50% off the website and they get invited to our events where they meet the artists and other cool people. […] The more the better!”
For more information or to browse the styles, you can visit this amazing initiative on Facebook, Instagram or at their website (www.heartcityapparel.com).
Images obtained from:
www.instagram.com/heartcityapparel