To Benefit Local Charities

The perfect collaboration has occurred to keep you looking fly and giving back! We couldn’t be more happy to bring focus to some of the amazing local charities that we’ve discovered and pair them with celebrated artists in the respective locations. This project with Ropeadope is all about community and culture—spread the word and the love.

It is common to see that unequivocal red sleeve tag on many of the T-shirts being worn around SOTRU’s office. Ropeadope’s distinctive tag, inventive designs and consistent quality has made them a premier online T-shirt retailer. Clothing is just a small part of who Ropeadope is. The brand is also a record label and esteemed cultural collective that shares that same community driven conscience as State of the Re:Union. So, it made so much sense to team up with them in a new T-shirt project that will be benefiting selected local charities. And just for the record, the collaborative moniker “SO-dope” was shot down . . . way down.

Today marks the first release of the project with three more to follow. The four designs are based on locations that SOTRU has featured in radio episodes. From there, a charity in the area was selected to get a portion of the proceeds of T-shirt sales. And lastly, we chose celebrated artists that are based in the respective city. Here is the breakdown:

Stephen Maman's Las Vegas Design

Las Vegas
Release Date: March 18th
Artist: Stephan Maman
Charity: Shine a Light

Los Angeles
Release Date: April 12th
Artist: Jim Darling
Charity: PATH – People Assisting the Homeless

Brooklyn
Release Date: May 17th
Artist: Aerosyn-Lex
Charity: Urban Word NYC

Austin
Release Date: June 14th
Artist: Brandon Ortwein
Charity: HAAM – Health Alliance for Austin Musicians

You can go here to pre-purchase the first shirt in the series, Stephan Maman’s Las Vegas design to which some of the proceeds will go to Shine a Light.

Image of the famed Fabulous Las Vegas sign courtesy of the Las Vegas Review-Journal, www.lvrj.com

Next week, SOTRU host Al Letson and I head out for a reporting trip to Las Vegas, a city of abundant nicknames. Most of them have to do with the Las Vegas that is a veritable icon of American culture: the glitz (City of Lights), the sleaze (Sin City), the celebrity (Entertainment Capital of the World), or a mixture of all of these (Glitter Gulch? Apparently, that’s downtown Las Vegas, according to some…). There’s a new candidate, though, attached to the newly minted version of Las Vegas, post-recession: Foreclosure City. (more…)