YOOW – Fashion & Design
The creations made from African fabrics by our seamstress Helga Mond were a hit for years. YOOW Fashion & Design (also for children) as its own label!
Four days a week, sewing took place in the Werkhaus Anti-Rost tailor’s workshop. Helga Mond taught young women the craft and designed together with Kambura Tekasala, a designer from the Democratic Republic of Congo. The fabrics came from Sierra Leone and were donated by a furniture store in Berlin.
Sewing machines, bicycles, and wheelchairs for Sierra Leone
Gerhard (Teddy) Dewitz was the manager of our “Aus Alt mach Neu” (Turn Old into New) workshop. When his employer went bankrupt and he lost his job, he became involved with YOOW. On his first trip to Africa, German President Horst Köhler took the YOOW sewing machines refurbished by Teddy with him to Sierra Leone.
Throughout Berlin, sewing machines, bicycles, wheelchairs, and walkers were collected, dismantled, cleaned, repaired, and then reassembled.
A container was packed and sent to our partner project MADAM in Sierra Leone. Some machines also went to Ethiopia.
Help with starting a business
After graduating from high school in Belfast, Philipp Schaube and Felix Wehinger met while doing community service with the organization “Tools for Solidarity.” They brought the idea of collecting old (but good!) tools, refurbishing them, and giving them to people in need back with them from Ireland.
This gave training graduates in Sierra Leone the opportunity to gain a foothold in their industry with a tool kit from YOOW. Young people in Germany were made aware of the unfair distribution of resources in the world.
Four years of refugee aid in Berlin
When the Ebola epidemic cut off bridges to Sierra Leone in 2015, we organized PC courses in Berlin for young people who had come to us as refugees. YOOW e.V. taught young people basic computer skills in shelters in Spandau, Charlottenburg, Wilmersdorf, Tempelhof-Schöneberg, and Mariendorf. They learned how to use an Office program to create applications for apartments or vocational training. Children were given a playful introduction to programming with Scratch.