Warner P. Woodworth

BYU culture seems to heavily focused on safe, conventional clothing attire, often for males consisting of white shirts, tie, and/or suit. So here is my alternative style, most of which I have worn to class on an occasion to make a point.

Below are radical themes and messages on shirts presented to me over the years regarding speeches, projects, or relevant topics. Together they make quite a fashion show along the theme of “Dress for Success.”

Mahatma Gandhi T-shirt received after speaking at the World Social Forum, Mumbai, India. It has his signature and his handwriting reproduced on the black shirt with the date 5-4-30. “I want world sympathy in the battle of Right against Might.” He was arrested and jailed by the British the day after he wrote these words April 5, 1930.

H.E.L.P. (Help ELiminate Poverty)Honduras fundraising 5k race to aid victims of Hurricane Mitch 1999, an event that supported sending some 46 BYU students to start 47 village banks, creating 800 jobs, and benefiting over 4000 poor Hondurans.

PT (Partido dos Trabalhadores) shirt given to me in 2003 by Brazilian Workers Party leaders after our candidate, Lula, was elected president of the country.

Chasqui: Kaye & Warner led a 10-day humanitarian expedition of 40 North Americans to work in the Sacred Valley of the Inca, Peru, 2000, in building adobe greenhouses, taking a dozen PCs and setting up a computer center in a town, building a solar-powered bathroom that provides hot water for showers at a school we built earlier, establishing a community library, and hiking the ruins of Machu Picchu.

Protest message on shirt given to me by United Steelworkers local #2701 after USX Corporation decided to mothball the Geneva Works, laying off 4000 Utah workers, costing the Utah economy about $561 million a year, while at the same time secretly making an agreement to use cheap steel from Pohang Works, South Korea.

Sorrowful T-shirt message by the last Master Organizational Behavior (MOB) degree – produced as student underground resistance to BYU’s axing of the U.S. #4-ranked program in 2002.

Shirt awarded after my speech at an environmental gathering to protest the company’s huge oil spill by the Exxon Valdez oil tanker in Prince William Sound in 1989, dumping 11 million gallons of oil, ruining 1,100 miles of coastline and killing/maiming millions of wildlife off the coast of Alaska.

New message of the re-designed BYU-OB program as a mere track in the Marriott School’s MBA program beginning in 2002.

Token gift for speaking at the “Pioneers in the Pacific Islands Conference” celebrating 150 years of LDS history in the islands, BYU-Hawaii, 1997. My presentation featured indigenous applications of grassroots economic development programs in the South Pacific.

UNITUS T-shirt celebrating our official launch at the Joseph Smith Memorial Building where we held a kick-off conference with 560 LDS movers and shakers, from across the U.S. who became “United” to combat global poverty, October 2000, Salt Lake City, Utah.

Presenter at the OB Teaching Conference, 2002, held at Chapman University, Orange, California. My presentation focused on service-learning as a method for college education that achieves real-world applications.

Polo shirt gift from our HELP International’s El Salvadorian partner ASEI (Asociacion Salvadorena de Extensionistas Empresariales). Sr. Ricardo Segovia, Founder and President, San Salvador, 2002. ASEI has 4,688 microcredit borrowers with a loan portfolio of $460,000. Note logo designed by HELP Country Director, Jay Porter of BYU.

FBLA (Future Business Leaders of America), Utah Chapter of Phi Beta Lambda, an educational fraternity I spoke to in Provo, Utah.

One of numerous Salt Lake-based fundraising events to support 15 years of effort among 72 indigenous villages in Mali, West Africa, building schools, digging wells, establishing a literacy program for 5000 adults, etc.

“Bounty Honey Loaf” Depicting one of our best-selling breads made by LDS workers of the Prince Bakery Cooperative. This was a gift to celebrate the success of our economic development projects among latter-day pioneer saints in Kenya, 2001.

Gift from the Progressive Skills Cooperative, an Enterprise Mentors-funded and worker-owned business that empowered laid-off Filipinos workers by establishing their own enterprises, electing managers and a board of directors, with 100 worker-owners, Manila, 1993. By doing this they were able to save jobs as well as control their destiny.

T-shirt from the World Social Forum that I spoke at held in Porto Alegre, Brazil, February 2002, attended by 50,000 activists from around the globe. It says: “Another World is Possible” in five languages.

Polo Shirt awarded to me by the Academy for Creating Enterprise, when I spoke at graduation ceremonies, July 10, 2000 in Cebu, Philippines. ACE is an innovative program to help young LDS returned missionaries learn key “Rules of Thumb” for entrepreneurial success.

Token remembrance from one of my trips to advise Soviet officials during Mikhail Gorbachev’s “Perestroika” strategy, 1989, Moscow, on issues of transitioning huge state-owned factories to private, worker-owned cooperatives.

Logo of my solidarity with the United Steelworkers of America in their fight against government and corporate power in the 1980s. I was invited to lead a delegation of small business owners, local government officials and union leaders to testify at congressional hearings in Washington, D.C. on outsourcing jobs and U.S. trade policies.

Program T-shirt for all speakers at the International Conference on the Economics of Workers’ Self-Managed Labour, 1980, Instanbul, Turkey, where I had been providing consultant assistance to many eastern European enterprises on empowering workers.

Masada memorial T-shirt Kaye and I got in Israel to remember the heroic resistance of a Jewish community on the high rock plateau in the Judean Desert near the Dead Sea. These Jewish resistance fighters used Masada as their base in their attacks against Roman occupiers of Palestine. In 72 A.D., they were surrounded by their enemies, but held out to the death rather than be captured.

Portrait of trade unionist leader, Lech Walesa, who organized Polish workers at the Gdansk shipyards in 1981, beginning the rise of a democratic labor union, “Solidarity,” that led to the country’s freedom from communist control, and eventually to the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the USSR.

T-shirt for my 1989 work in launching a “people-powered” NGO, Enterprise Mentors (EMI) in the U.S. and its partner Philippines Enterprise Development Foundation in Manila to create jobs and build self-reliance. Since then, EMI has spread to some 20 offices in five countries.

Another Ouelessebougou-Utah Alliance shirt for supporting 15 years of village development, women’s cooperatives, and microcredit in Mali, West Africa.

Members’ shirt of Earth First!, the most radical environmental organization in the world. I joined the group in 1984 to fight against the destruction of our ecological home: the earth.

Conference gift for speakers at the 13th O.D. World Congress held in Russia, summer 1993, where I had spent a lot of my consulting efforts doing organizational development in the transitioning economies of the former USSR.

Commencement shirt given to Warner at the launch of the Microcredit Summit in 1997 – an 8 year campaign to enable 100 million of the world’s poorest families to obtain access to microfinance.

FINCA Banco Communal: FINCA village banking shirt given to me by one of the largest microfinance foundations in the world, FINCA International. Since 1998, at BYU, we have funded the start-up of 47 banks, re-capitalized another 50, and partnered with FINCA in research to assess the impacts of microloans in building a better quality of life for poor Third World families.