Trained in landscape architecture and inspired by urban design, Colleen Clines has shaped her career around one mantra: design can change lives. With a trip to India in 2009, she set her sights higher than changing the physical landscapes around her. She and Devon Miller founded Anchal Project, a nonprofit organization, with the hope of changing the social and economic landscapes of women on two continents. Anchal is succeeding in that endeavor and now a small, formerly vacant, lot in the Portland neighborhood is at the heart of that work.
“I’ve always had an urban design interest and was intrigued by natural textile creation. So when an opportunity came along through the Lots of Possibility competition last year, we put together a proposal for a dye garden,” says Clines. Mayor Greg Fischer’s Lots of Possibility competition challenged people to come up with innovative ways to turn abandoned lots into productive community assets. Anchal Project’s dyeScape was one of only two winners of a $15,000 grant and ownership of a vacant lot, located at 1657 Portland Avenue.
The dyeScape Project, which officially launched in August, is a first of its kind dye garden in the United States. The idea is to cultivate crops that will serve as a supply source for dyes that will be used by Anchal’s artisans in India to create new textiles.
“What sets this project apart [from other community projects] is the potential for long term, sustainable economic development,” says Louis Johnson, an urban designer with Gresham Smith and Partners, an architecture and engineering firm, and project manager for the dyeScape Project.
Anchal is the key to making this a local economic success, he continues. “For instance you may build a community garden to sell produce, but if you lack any means or expertise to sell those products you will struggle to make ends meet. In this instance we have Anchal, who is rapidly expanding their efforts in India for sustainable textile products and our hometown could reasonably supply the natural dyes for those products.”
Clines acknowledges that in order to make long-term economic development sustainable, scale is important. Accordingly, Anchal’s dyeScape team, which includes Clines’ sister, Maggie Clines as Creative Director, hopes that the Portland garden will be a prototype for other dye gardens nationally and internationally. “The five year plan is to expand within India to include more women [artisans] and different cities, as well as focusing on expanding [the dye gardens and brand] in the U.S. and including more women in Louisville,” says Clines.
More Than a Garden
More than fifty local volunteers have helped Anchal build raised beds, plant and cultivate crops already. The goal, however, is to provide education workshops and hands-on training in the dyeScape so that the crops and resulting textiles will generate paid opportunities locally and abroad.
The Portland Avenue garden features a shed and pergola, which will be used to conduct workshops, aid in processing crops and allow Anchal to experiment to determine the best plants on which to focus in this climate.
“DyeScape is educational, teaching folks not only about dyes and the ecology around the plant materials used, but about the impacts of consumer waste, and waste byproducts derived from industrial textiles,” says Johnson. “In a very open and community-focused way, Anchal is teaching entrepreneurship and we are hoping it will be able to offer a number of local organizations ways to plug into this effort.”
Design Can Change Lives
Acquiring additional lots and growing brand awareness will be key components to success, says Clines. For years, Anchal’s small team trained exploited women in India to create textile products that could then be sold through Anchal’s retailers. It grew its network of artisans, product lines and sales channels through partnerships with Indian non-governmental organizations, socially conscious e-commerce sites and like-minded advocates. The brand has gotten traction with sales through retailers ranging from NuLu’s Revelry Boutique Gallery to Urban Outfitters. A collaboration with actress America Ferrera, named the Didi Connection after the term of affection used between Indian women, generated further expansion.
Today, Anchal has more than 100 textile workers in India working full-time jobs, free of sexual exploitation. And Clines is optimistic about the future. “We see Anchal becoming a leader in the social enterprise movement,” she says.
While Anchal’s complete vision may take some time, the dyeScape is already enhancing the surrounding community. “The community members and neighbors are pleased to see positive intervention, a lot with pretty flowers growing,” said Clines.
Simply improving the appearance of Portland Avenue has the potential to engage the community and spur more growth in other vacant lots in the area, says Johnson. “Economic development doesn’t always have to be a Wal-Mart behind 500 parking spaces, it can also be acres and acres of beautiful landscapes.”
