"Creating a World full of Heroes". This was close to becoming our brand before my good friend Patricia came in with her creative team and created WEEROES. We agreed that statement would stay as our mission, which inspires us and which we take very seriously.
WEEROES empowers children to express their desire to be Heroes visually, by creating looks to fill their wardrobe with quality herowear for everyday use. As we've said before, we're serious about quality. High quality fabrics and finishes, because these clothes are worn by my child, whom I love and take great care of.
So children now have clothes to identify themselves as heroes. But that's not enough, we want to help families raise them to be Heroes. After several contacts and brainstorming with teachers, parents, psychologists and others, we were ecstatic to make the acquaintance of an organisation that also dedicates itself to sharing with people how they can be heroic.
Social psychologists have studied the phenomena of how historically, "ordinary" people, even "good" people, are capable of horrific actions. Entire societies support of slavery, nazism, extremism and other, from a distance, clear and public abuses of Human rights are historical facts. How were those systematic situations possible?
Several social experiments by Solomon Asch and Stanley Milgram in the 1960s laid some basic theories and in the 1970s Dr. Phil Zimbardo from Stamford led the eye opening "Stamford Prison Experiment". Adapted into a movie - which we highly recommend - it even had a personal impact on Prof. Zimbardo. No spoilers, see it.
Some time after SPE, Dr. Zimbardo decided to change the way he looked at the problem from "how are ordinary people capable of horrific actions" to "how can ordinary people have heroic attitudes?" Today, Dr. Zimbardo leads the Heroic Imagination Project, "to encourage and empower individuals to take heroic action during crucial moments in their lives."
Their work is inspirational and we are working to develop the WEEROES Academy, a program to help kids in pre and primary school become the next generation of Heroes. Stay tuned.