A year ago, my friend Sean contacted me to tell me about a school club a few of his teammates from Main Line United were helping out with. The Workshop School is a project-based charter school that takes an innovative approach to teacher and learning. Sean and his teammates were pitching in to help by incorporating a jiu-jitsu program into the school’s offerings. When I saw that the students were using "jawn" -- a Philadelphia catch-all colloquialism -- for an ornament project, we had to get involved.

In case you don't know, "jawn" is an all-purpose pronoun that's unique to Eastern Pennsylvania, mainly Philadelphia, that can refer to any person, place, or thing, such as "pass me that jawn" or "see you down at the jawn." The kids at The Workshop School have adopted it as their logo and use it in fabrication projects.

After emailing back and forth for a few weeks, we visited the school. We got to meet the kids and talk them through the gi design process. They were great to work with, being part of a project-oriented school showed right away, and after some brainstorming we had a pretty good idea what they wanted their gi to look like. 

One thing was clear, they wanted their bestselling item to appear on it somehow, so adding their signature JAWN somewhere on the gi was a given. After a few redesigns and samples, we arrived at what you see here.

Now this is the part where we need your help.

Not all the kids at the school can afford to buy a gi. Most of them are wearing hand-me-downs given to them from Main Line United members. We are trying to use the “buy one, give one” model to get them outfitted in fresh uniforms. Here’s how it works:

• You place a pre-order for a gi
• For every gi bought during the preorder we will give one gi to the kids from the workshop school
• Our goal on this project is to give 25 gis to the school
• Preorders will be open for a week, then we expect gis to arrive somewhere in mid-October.
• This is our first time doing something like this, but if we can do some good for these kids we would like to explore doing this more often

If you are interested in a new gi and would like to help these awesome kids train jiu-jitsu this is the gi for you.

Place your pre-order today.