Most graduating high school students are currently putting thought into their big graduation day looks and celebrating the looming end of school. Erinne Paisley from Victoria, BC, however, is thinking about all the girls around the world who never get the chance at an education.
Instead of dropping cash on a fancy dress for her graduation celebration, the thoughtful young woman decided to raise awareness and funds to help those who don’t have the privileges she does.
Erinne created a dress for herself out of old homework. She wrote a message on it reminding people that education is often denied to women and girls around the world.
The message reads “I’ve recieved [with spelling correction] my education. Not every woman has that right. Malala.org.”
The website refers to the Malala Fund, a fund started by international activist Malala Yousafzai, who works to provide education for girls and young women around the world.
The idea of a dress made out of unusual material actually came about before Erinne got the idea to integrate the social message. “Someone I know made a [graduation] dress out of newspaper a few years ago, and then her other friend did a different dress out of neckties,” she told Yahoo. “So the idea of recycled dresses had kind of always been in the back of my mind.”
Throughout her high school career, Erinne has been interested in activism, and she co-founded her school’s activist organization. During her senior year, the organization focused on women’s rights around the world, inspiring Erinne to raise awareness about equal education. She decided to use her graduation, a symbol of her own education, to point out that not every girl is afforded the same opportunity. This idea came together nicely with her old idea of a recycled dress, and thus the homework dress was born.
“As graduation got closer, the fact that 62 million girls around the world don’t have access to secondary education as I was preparing to celebrate my own secondary education was something that was really moving to me,” she says.
The dress was created after a bit of “trial and error” on Erinne’s part, and it was held together with a velvet waistband and satin straps.
For being made out of paper with no real pattern, it looks pretty cute! The money she would have spent was donated to the Malala Fund.
But Erinne didn’t stop with just spreading awareness.
She’s also auctioning the dress off to raise money for the Malala Fund. Currently, the top bid is $1,150, and with two weeks left in the campaign, she’s hoping to raise more. That money will also go to the Malala Fund.
In the fall, Erinne will attend the University of Toronto to study international relations. The story of her dress is up on the Malala Fund’s site, and Erinne was thrilled to discover that Malala herself checks the auction meter regularly.
If you’d like to make sure girls everywhere have access to an education, you can learn how to help at the Malala Fund’s website.
(via BuzzFeed, Yahoo, Malala.org)
While raising money is a goal, Erinne is more concerned with getting the awareness of education-starved girls out there. “There is so much energy and attention put into the high school graduation celebration in North America that I wondered if some of that could be redirected to support the Malala Fund’s fight for girls’ rights to education around the world,” she says.
