SISU: Stitching Lives Back Together

SISU: Stitching Lives Back Together

The SISU program on Canal Street is bringing Lawrence back to its roots. The current occupants of the former Lawrence Plate and Glass building are in the clothing business. While several steps removed from the textile and clothing industry of the original Lawrence Mills, SISU has incorporated screen printing and embroidery into its growing workforce development program. Tuesday through Friday, fifty weeks a year, some of Lawrence’s hardest to reach young people are designing and producing clothing for local schools, non-profits, small businesses, and themselves in the SISU Prints program.

SISU Prints is an example of Hive Mind at its finest. SISU’s YouthBuild Lawrence program has a thirty-year history of workforce development and building affordable housing in the City. Young people worked towards completing their GED while also spending the hottest days of the summer and the coldest days of the winter on a construction site. The construction program remains an important component of SISU/YouthBuild Lawrence, but many of the proven risk young people SISU works are looking for something more.

Adapt or accept irrelevance – SISU chose to adapt and looked to the Hive to help maintain relevance. Youth voice is an important component of positive youth development theory, and has played a key role in the overall development of the SISU program. In 2018, SISU youth were looking for ways out of the elements and to exercise their creative juices. Like most young people their age, fashion is an important avenue of self-expression, and they wanted to design clothes. It was a big idea with even bigger potential.

Fast forward to the Spring of 2023 and that big idea has manifested into two workshops at 417 Canal Street. When you leave the lobby and enter the main artery of SISU, the first door on your left opens into a large shop with an 8-head embroidery machine, a single head embroidery machine, and a wall board full of colored thread.

During morning and afternoon sessions, young people move through their assigned stations putting clothing onto the hoops that fit onto the embroidery heads, rethreading the heads, and trimming the excess backing off of the finished product. It can be tedious work, but the wait list to join the embroidery program is proof the young people don’t mind.

Moving on, you can follow the fumes of freshly printed t-shirts down the main artery and into the Screen Printing Shop. A five head printing press is surrounded by boxes of new product and piles of printed clothing. The press is constantly going as four SISU participants rotate between placing shirts on the heads, lowering and squeegeeing the ink onto the screens, heating and drying the shirts, and folding. Screen printing can be hard work but the young people who stick with the screen printing shop love it and work hard to maintain their spot in the program.

While SISU Prints has grown into a micro-enterprise, it can in no way be construed as a money making venture. SISU Prints is a learning environment where mistakes are expected and waste is recycled into tools for learning.

Funded primarily by grants, the instructors follow curriculum designed to teach young people all facets of the business, as well as the soft skills that will help them be successful in whatever job they choose.