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sustaInaBlE FashIon : a handBooK For Educators
suMMary
A project funded by the US Department of Agriculture,
Socially Responsible Apparel Production and Sourcing is
described as a model of collaboration across universities
to develop and disseminate online courses focused on
social responsibility to post-baccalaureate students and
industry professionals. Ten online courses were developed
and are initially being offered to students from our three
universities. In the future, they will be offered to students
from any university or from industry through the University
of Delaware. We discuss the types of courses created,
their format, the challenges of offering courses across
universities, and how we are sustaining their offer beyond
the funding period.
The courses were defined to encompass issues of social
responsibility in the apparel industry as follows:
- Apparel supply chains and social responsibility.
- Socially responsible apparel: Global policy.
- Sustaining global apparel supply chains.
- Culture and work in the apparel industry.
- Apparel consumers and social responsibility.
- Bringing social responsibility to apparel
corporate culture. - Current initiatives for apparel industry labor compliance.
- Worker-centric social responsibility for the
apparel industry. - Redesigning green apparel: Design, sourcing
and packaging. - Producing environmentally responsible apparel.
collaBoratIng across unIVErsItIEs and
Industry to oFFEr EducatIonal opportunItIEs For
socIal rEsponsIBIlIty
In 2002, aware of the efforts leading apparel brands and
retailers were making to improve labor standards and
working conditions, as well as environmental sustainability
in their global supply chains, Dr. Marsha Dickson, University
of Delaware, realized that students going into the
industry as designers, buyers, merchandisers, or product
development and sourcing professionals, needed to be
part of the efforts to improve the lives of workers. Dickson
convened Dr. Suzanne Loker from Cornell University and
Dr. Molly Eckman, Colorado State University, and other
colleagues to collaborate on this initiative. The United
States Department of Agriculture provided a funding
opportunity through its Higher Education Challenge
Grant program that encouraged development of curricula,
teaching materials and instructional delivery systems
for addressing international educational needs. Thus, we
proposed to the federal agency a project to develop a
core set of Internet-based post-baccalaureate courses
and learning materials focused on “Social Responsibility in
Textile, Apparel, and Footwear Industry Supply Chains” for
joint delivery to graduate students in our three institutions’
apparel programs.The specific objectives we set for the project included:- Objective 1: Developing a core set of Internet-based
courses providing competencies for socially responsible
textile, apparel, and footwear industry supply chain
management. - Objective 2: Developing a portfolio of multimedia case
studies incorporating multinational perspectives on social
responsibility in textile, apparel, and footwear industry
supply chains. - Objective 3: Delivering and assessing outcomes of the
courses at the three partner institutions.
Representatives of industry were very supportive of
the plan to create graduate courses addressing social
responsibility in the apparel industry. For example, Dusty
Kidd, Vice President of Compliance for Nike, stated in a
letter of recommendation that,“Prof. Marsha Dickson is a leading academic in the field
of CSR and its application to the textiles and apparel field.
The vision put forth in her proposal recognizes the need
to develop a system of competencies in the field and to
integrate CSR issues into business decision-making, which is
precisely the vision companies like Nike are driving toward.
The reality is that the largest share of people working in CSR
roles in companies like Nike come from related fields but not
out of a CSR course of study, since few, if any exist. If such
a field of study opens, the industry will have access to a job
candidate pool not only for the special functional areas of
CSR, but also for related fields of work where an appreciation
of CSR is important in business decision-making: supply
chain management, pricing, materials management and
related fields. This drives at the heart of a very large need in
the industry, which is to ensure all business managers have
an understanding of CSR and apply “balanced scorecard”
concepts to their business operations.”