Hashtag for humanity

How a fashion challenge turned into a mission to save the world

Lindsey Clark and Lauren Palomares each made plans to leave Tulsa after graduating from ORU. Before flying the coop, the two resolved to remain close as they headed toward opposite coasts. With the help of hand-held technology, the twenty-somethings decided to turn the challenge of staying in touch on its head.  

The two decided to put each other up to fashion “challenges,” such as trying out a crown-braid hairstyle or putting their own creative spin on the latest runway trends. They uploaded the results to the photo-sharing social media site Instagram.  They used the hashtag #CoastToCoastChallenge to build a cache of their photos for the challenge and to make access easy. 

Soon Clark and Palomares noticed Instagram users from around the country were using the hashtag. The challenge spread, catching on like a digital wildfire. A correspondence that started in Tulsa has now touched women’s lives around the world, and back. 

“Girls around the globe were beginning to join us. After a couple of weeks, we decided to create a blog as a home and central hub for our new Instagram fashion challenge. Our desire was that the blog would become a place of inspiration for women; a place where they could feel challenged, inspired, and empowered,” Palomares said.

Now the hashtag is a mainstay in the tech-vernacular of fashionable Instagram users. A search returns images of participants of all ages from a variety of backgrounds but, for one photographic moment, lead parallel lives. Three months after #CoastToCoastChallenge was used for the first time, Clark and Palomares reunited in California to dream. “To be honest, we thought it was ironic that the two of us were running a fashion blog. After all, we would both describe ourselves as “humanitarians” over “fashionistas” any day of the week. It was that one conversation during lunch that changed everything,” said Clark. “In a flash of a moment, everything made sense.” 

The friends decided to turn their fashion challenge and the online network they’d rallied into a social enterprise. Coast to Coast Central, an organization formed to fight social injustices from sex trafficking and forced prostitution to hunger, was born. Coast to Coast Central and its online community, now in 100 countries with 25,000 uses of the #CoasttoCoastChallenge hashtag, are rallying to fund projects in Quito, Ecuador, and Kampong Thom, Cambodia.

“Our mission would be to empower women: from the college sophomore trying to find her place in the world to the homemakers of American suburbia to the village girls in South America to the women enslaved in sex trafficking,” said Palomares.

C2C is international, but it’s rooted in Tulsa where it sparked. Some of its staff is here, including photographers and videographers Katie O’Toole and Justin Kila and web designer Jesse Dowd.

While a hashtag in and of itself doesn’t make the impact, by design, it’s the connecting piece to build and unify an online community.  Ultimately, Lauren and Lindsey hope to utilize the hashtag to drive visitors to CoasttoCoastCentral.com and inspire them to act, whether it be through participating in the biweekly fashion challenge on social media or using a blogging platform to tell about the work of Coast to Coast Central. Though fashion and style are front and center on the site, it also serves to shine light on some not-so-pretty issues faced by many women around the world. 

Lauren and Lindsey have also created a “Darling” necklace and Wolf tees to help raise funds for their initiatives and summer humanitarian trips staffed with volunteer C2C activists.  As Lindsey explained, “It is a domino effect. Once a girl stumbles upon the challenge, she comes to an understanding that there is an inviting community along side of it. The community not only brings sparkle to life through fashion, but also through bringing hope to the hopeless.”