In the past two years, we have collaborated with 18 bands, all comprised of members of the Isla Vista community. These are our favorite type of events to throw because of the publicity we are able to bring to newer groups.
When we are not working to uplift fellow students, we are open to collaborating with local Isla Vista businesses! Our most recent was with Farmacy, a new dispensary in Isla Vista. We brought our following to the store by hosting a Free-for-Free, and in return we got a great central venue space and Farmacy gave out rewards and coupons to anyone who donated clothing to us at the event.

Valentines Day 2024 was our biggest event in the past two years! We recirculated 841 items of clothing in 5 hours on UCSB's campus. We can do this through having our events be "Three-for-Free"s, where anyone from the community can come and grab three or less items of clothing with no strings attached. We also ran different upcycling stations, including homemade clothing stamping, mending, and patch making. In order to truly make this feel like a community event in the way we envisioned, we parter with an array of student-organization vendors, all pertaining in some way to the event's theme of "love". This year, we worked with Students for Reproductive Justice, SexInfo Online, the Trans and Queer Commission, and more!

In the 2024-2025 schoolyear, we partnered with Depop to help us put on more events. We started off the year by purging our donations shed with a Goodwill "bins" style event, complete with free merch from the company. We chose to accept this sponsorship because of how closely they align with our mission statement of circular economies and keeping textiles out of landfills and into the hands of our neighbors.

working with cool venues like the iconic Isla Vista "Dome House", tabling on campus for event outreach, creative posters for each event
Not all of our events are partnerships, however, and we love hosting events by ourselves as well. This event from Spring 2025 was one of my favorites because we were able to host it at the iconic "Dome House" in Isla Vista.

To make these events successful, we have a strong tabling presence on campus. At least once a week, we set up in the main stretch of campus or attend sustainability fairs to promote our organization and mission, either urging people to come to our events and get free clothes, or purge their closets and donate to us! To round out our outreach approach, we have a strong Instagram presence (@ivtradingpost) and utilize one of our many creative members from our Art Committee to design a custom poster for each of our events.