Kelly Drennan is a systems thinker, thought leader and disruptor devoted to making change within the fashion industry. In 2007 she founded Fashion Takes Action, out of her desire to create a better, more sustainable future for her two daughters. Her role at FTA is to identify the barriers to sustainability that exist for both industry and consumers, and do what she can to remove them.
Determined to making fashion circular, Kelly is currently conducting Canada’s first textile recycling feasibility study, which will result in an industry roadmap in spring 2021. From 2018-2020 she convened the Ontario Textile Diversion Collaborative with a group of more than 30 stakeholders (municipalities, charities, collectors, retailers, NGOs, policy makers and academics) committed to increasing textile diversion, through a collective impact framework. Kelly is an advisor to the Textile Lab for Circularity in Vancouver, and is an active member of the City of Toronto’s Circular Economy Working Group.
Kelly created the annual WEAR conference in 2014, which has now become the WEAR webinar series. In these seven years, she has hosted hundreds of industry experts in sharing practical insights to thousands of global attendees. She is a sought-after speaker herself, having given hundreds of presentations to industry, academics and consumers, and most recently she delivered a TED talk as part of the Global TED Countdown event focused on climate action.
Kelly is passionate about collaboration and bringing together multiple perspectives in an effort to take action. In 2019 she co-created the Sustainable Fashion Toolkit in partnership with PwC Canada, and she oversees FTA’s youth education program My Clothes My World that she created in 2015 for students in grades 4-12 — delivered to more than 20,000 students in classrooms across Ontario and in Vancouver – and now being delivered digitally.
