Prefigurative Community Building (Part 11)
Building Power With: Starting Clothing Swaps and Mending Circles for Community Resilience
In a world dominated by fast fashion’s exploitative cycle, where clothes are cheaply made, quickly discarded, and damaging to the planet and people alike, Clothing Swaps and Mending Circles offer a powerful act of collective resistance. These community events are more than just ways to recycle textiles, they are spaces where people gather to share skills, foster mutual care, and rebuild the social fabric through collaborative creativity and resourcefulness.
Organized as a Power With coordination pattern, these initiatives break away from hierarchical or transactional models of exchange and instead center shared ownership, inclusivity, and empowerment. This essay offers a step-by-step guide to starting your own clothing swap and mending circle that embodies these principles, along with useful resources and inspiring examples.
Why Clothing Swaps and Mending Circles?
Fast fashion exploits labor, depletes resources, and generates mountains of waste. Swapping clothes extends the life of garments, reduces demand for new production, and challenges consumer culture. Mending circles teach repair skills that defy disposability and empower participants to care for their belongings and each other.
Together, these activities are acts of Power With because they:
Center cooperation over competition
Build skills and confidence collectively
Redistribute material resources without money
Cultivate social bonds that strengthen community resilience
Challenge hierarchical consumerist norms
Step-by-Step Guide to Starting a Power With Clothing Swap and Mending Circle
1. Gather Your Community
Start by inviting people you know or reaching out through local networks—community centers, libraries, schools, social media groups, or places of worship. Host a casual meetup or potluck where you can talk about the idea and listen deeply to what people want and need.
Avoid Power Over: Let the group shape the vision. Resist imposing rules or leaders. Power With begins by listening and co-creating.
2. Find an Accessible, Welcoming Space
Look for a space that is easy to reach, physically accessible, and feels safe and welcoming to all identities. This might be a community room, a church hall, a library meeting room, or even a friendly café with a back room.
Consider seating arrangements that encourage conversation and connection. Circle seating often works well.
3. Define Shared Values and Agreements
Together, create simple agreements to guide the event. These could include:
Respect for everyone’s belongings and boundaries
Consent around touching or trying on clothes
No judgment or shaming of clothing choices or mending skill level
Commitment to share knowledge and support others
Use consensus or other collaborative decision methods to make these agreements. Write them down and display them during events.
4. Organize the Clothing Swap
Ask participants to bring clean, gently used clothes they no longer want. To keep it inclusive and sustainable:
Encourage bringing seasonal or versatile items
Invite swapping children’s clothes, accessories, or shoes too
Use a simple system for exchange: people can take what they need, offer what they bring, and maybe donate leftover items to local shelters or recycling programs
Make sure there is a quiet, respectful atmosphere. This is not a market, but a gift economy based on trust and generosity.
5. Host the Mending Circle
Set up tables with basic sewing kits, needles, threads, patches, and tools for different textile repairs. Encourage everyone to bring their own clothes to mend, but also have some donations available to practice on.
Create a culture where skill sharing happens naturally:
Invite experienced sewers to guide beginners
Share tips and techniques openly
Celebrate all attempts, regardless of skill level
Foster patience and mutual encouragement
6. Build Community Beyond the Event
Integrate food sharing, music, storytelling, or art to make the space welcoming and vibrant. Plan regular gatherings so relationships and skills can deepen.
Encourage participants to exchange contact info or join online groups to continue support between meetings.
7. Use and Share Resources
Here are a few excellent resources to support your project:
The Repair Café Foundation — Offers guides on hosting repair events and building community repair culture
https://repaircafe.org/en/The Textile Exchange — Provides tools for sustainable textile reuse and repair
https://textileexchange.org/Sewing.org — Beginner-friendly sewing guides and resources
https://www.sewing.org/
Examples of Existing Projects
1. Sew Together London (UK)
A grassroots group hosting regular community mending circles combined with textile swaps. They emphasize accessibility, peer learning, and celebrating textile heritage as resistance to fast fashion.
Website:
https://sewtogetherlondon.org/
2. The Clothes Swap Project (USA)
An all-volunteer initiative organizing pop-up clothing swaps paired with workshops on repair and upcycling. Their events foster community connections and encourage sustainable fashion practices.
Website:
https://www.clothesswapproject.org/
Repairing the Social Fabric
Clothing swaps and mending circles do more than extend the life of textiles. They mend the torn threads of community and trust in a culture increasingly fragmented by consumerism and isolation. When people come together around shared care for each other’s belongings, a different kind of power emerges, one based on reciprocity, mutual aid, and relational strength.
In these spaces, skills become gifts freely given, stories are exchanged alongside stitches, and social bonds grow tighter. This is the essence of Power With: power not wielded over others, but power generated through connection, cooperation, and collective creativity.
By repairing our clothes, we repair the social fabric too, building resilient communities ready to face ecological and social challenges together.