Veronika Scott of UIX get capital love from Washington Post

One of the early heroines of our own Urban Innovation Exchange project, Veronika Scott, is getting some much-deserved national love her for her nonprofit the Empowerment Plan, which employs homeless women to make coats for the homeless.

An excerpt from the Washington Post:

Scott, now 23, was a student at College for Creative Studies in Detroit when she launched her project by working on a class assignment with this direction: "Design to fill a need."

Scott spent months at a Michigan shelter getting to know the homeless. While there, she began working on a design for a coat prototype for the homeless that weighed 20 pounds and took 80 hours to make, earning her the nickname of the "crazy coat lady."

But Scott streamlined her design. She now employs homeless women to work in a formerly abandoned warehouse where they use donated materials and equipment from General Motors and Carhartt to make warm convertible coats for the homeless. Scott expects that her nonprofit, The Empowerment Plan, will produce 800 coats by year's end.

"She's changing the world, one coat at a time," Kennedy said at the ceremony inside the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum.

Read more here.