Newspaper jackets warm Toronto homeless
TORONTO, ON--Award winning advertising guru Steve Mykolyn was walking home from a Toronto Raptor's basketball game one February night in 2007 when his 17-year-old son stopped to give change to a man huddled on a heating vent. He asked the man how they should help the homeless.
That question was still buzzing in Mykolyn's mind when the chairman and co-founder of TAXI Canada Inc., the ad agency Mykolyn works for, challenged his company to find a creative way to "give back" to the community.
Mykolyn, the executive creative director of TAXI's Toronto office, pitched the idea of a winter coat stuffed with used newspaper to keep homeless people warm.
The idea became a jacket design labeled 15 Below—the temperature at which cold weather alerts are issued.
The water-proof jacket has pockets in the hood, chest, back and arms which can be stuffed with crumpled newspapers, magazines and flyers to provide insulation. It folds easily to be worn as a backpack or used as a pillow.
"Unstuffed it serves as a windbreaker and raincoat," Mykolyn says. "It is super functional, really well made and well designed."
Some 80 jackets were distributed at a Salvation Army homeless shelter earlier this winter and TAXI plans to distribute a total of 3,000 across Canada this year when cold weather alerts are issued.
"They really thought through the issues which come to homelessness," says Dion Oxford, director of the Gateway shelter where the jacket was launched. "Initially it sounded like a bit of a joke to us--but the more we thought of it, the more we realized that it was a very smart, practical and functional idea."
Oxford and his team first met Mykolyn when he brought the prototype to Gateway for their feedback, and was greeted with an overwhelmingly positive response.
"Winter jackets are hard to come by," Oxford says, "so brand new winter jackets especially designed for people on the streets bring me joy for sure.
"These coats are cool because they can be worn three seasons of the year. People on the street don't have places to store things. So they will often wear a winter coat for the winter and then discard it, or wear it in the summer and become dangerously overheated."
He says that January and February are often the hardest months of the year for those in street mission, and "these coats will help us through that season".
"The guys really liked them," Oxford says, "They're really nice--I like it enough I'd buy and wear it myself.
"It helps the homeless see that there is value in them as people--a dignity to them--when you give them a brand new coat instead of an old frayed up coat nobody wants anymore."
Mykolyn--who has produced campaigns for brands that include Sony, Levi's, Nike and Mini--says the jacket was developed in partnership with premier fashion designer Lida Baday, and that the campaign has been "a huge collaborative effort" between her team, TAXI staff, the manufacturer and others.
A host of celebrities including Michael Caine, Elton John, Norman Jewison, Nelly Furtado and John Stewart signed jackets which were auctioned online, raising some $8,000 for Salvation Army's distribution. TAXI now hopes to find a corporate sponsor who can take the project to the rest of Canada.
"What excites me about it," Mykolyn says, "is that there is now one more tool--in a whole toolbox of solutions--to help a homeless person get through the night and through the winter."
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