“Hello Centretown! I’m Hope Wood. Director of Social Enterprise for Big Brothers Big Sisters of Ottawa. I would say that the reason why I’ve started doing this work was because my parents were very young when they had me and we didn’t have a lot when I was younger. We had food insecurity. New clothes were a little bit harder to come by. So giving back was important to me. And to be able to provide something to our community that was tangible. So with Big Brothers Big Sisters, they’ve allowed me to do a free pay-it-forward program where we can give youth and their families clothing for free, through other agencies. We had a great initiative last year where we had celebrity closets. And that’s kind of where the idea of Fashion for Futures evolved from. Fashion for Futures was held in Centretown at the Museum of Nature on April 17th, 2026. The event has really given us a platform to showcase the clothes from the program and our shop, Thrive. And also showcase what we do with our youth employment program and really showcase some of our youth and what they’ve learnt, and the mentorship that they’ve had from different people involved with us, myself, and some of the other staff from the store, and the agency. I always see myself working somewhere with youth, specifically younger women. I don’t think I have a full plan. I’m going with the flow. I really just want to feel happiness in what I do in my life and in my home. It’s really important for me to have a really good balance. So being able to have my daughter who’s 12, be able to come in and sometimes work with me at the store is really important to me. And be able to show her what’s the community and how to give back and how to be a part of it, not only through your work, but through volunteering.
One of the girls that I’ve mentored, who had a really hard upbringing, came in, she wasn’t doing very well. But she needed a place to be safe. That’s something that we’ve been able to provide her. She is just a delight, and I absolutely adore her, and she just needed someone to be able to listen to her, understand her and sometimes give her gentle guidance. Other times be a little bit more harsh and tell her she’s wrong. But also, to celebrate those wins. Last year she was given an award at her school for the most improved. Being at Thrive, and she did account for some of it with working with us and having security and having an adult to talk to. We are considering making our mentorship more formal and formalizing it with Big Brothers Big Sisters.
I think that it would be really great to have a network of thrift shops. I think that it started a little bit last year with Thrive and Catherine Landry of She Shops Local. We started a disco bus that took you to different towns, but we did one in Ottawa that took us to a couple places in the Glebe. And that was nice to see. And now you can see like sometimes one of the other stores will share one of our reels, or we’ll share their information. And that’s been really wonderful. I think there is more room for youth programming in these stores. Of course, sometimes when you want to have volunteers, you do need to be a nonprofit or have more, um, community-based thoughts, I guess. I would love to reach them to reach out to me or for us to reach out to them as well. Of course, there’s Habitat for Humanity near Centertown. They have been wonderful to work with. We did a disco bus with them as well. Yeah, so we’re always looking for new ways to reach more people.”
