Welcome to Managing Love

Managing Love is inspired by the most marginalized members of both the Charlottesville community and our international partners and friends. Our approach is multi-faceted. From the refugee community to the currently homeless, we take pride in helping alleviate societal injustices through servant leadership. 

• Humbly deemed an expert on global homelessness, our founder Gwen Cassady has been invited to present at the United Nations twice.  Presenting at the first intergovernmental dialogue on global homelessness, she helped with creating new policy to alleviate homelessness. There were two resolutions the UN hoped to solve. Although leading members of the General Assembly couldn't devise a definition, they did determine new metrics to be able to measure the plight.

• Currently, members of the Managing Love team are focusing on combatting child sex trafficking at the systemic level with policy makers in the State of Virginia and with a similar goal at the Federal level.  Having been trafficked by her mother starting at age 4 in her upper middle class town, Zionsville, Indiana, being trafficked was so normalized coupled with the leader of the 'Knights of Zion', King Arthur, a chemist at Eli Lilly, forcing little lady Gweniviere to take a special pill every night to assuage the physical pain and suppress her memory.  After seeing two of her pimp cousins at her Granddaddy Gale's funeral, the memories started creeping into her cerebral cortex in her mid-30s. She underwent EMDR treatment with a top specialist in the state of Virginia and was finally able to recover the debilitating memories starting with her mother forcing her to 'collect the rent' from the neighbors as a 4 year old including other heinous and atrocious acts against children.

• We raise awareness to pertinent social injustices through our documentary film division, Vision Forward Media.

• Having received our first Dave Matthews Band BAMA grant, we are launching the Kids Climate Club in 2023.  As an Earth Day Network partner, the Love Mother Earth festivals help bring the Charlottesville community together in helping to alleviate the burden those before us have created environmentally by learning how to protect and nurture our natural resources.

• International Villas, the first net positive, passive small home community, provides for 'a whole new way of living' as described by our founder's Harvard Civil Engineering professor, where the Earth comes first, Community second, and Selflessness third.  Our pilot program, Cville Villas, our founder's Harvard capstone, will be a small home community for homeless female veterans, sex trafficked survivors, domestic violence survivors, and girls aging out of the foster care system in the Charlottesville area.  

• Empowering local refugees while providing high quality apparel, the Super Sewing Shop allows for each individual refugee to cultivate owning their own small business. Managing Love will be offering free sewing classes starting in January at Visible Records.  

• In addition to learning how to sew, in alignment with her Harvard studies with a focus on Global Development Practice, we will be providing EcoChats to discuss the benefits of slow fashion, the perils of fast fashion, and an Empirical Analysis of Second-Hand Commodities, all topics our founder has lectured on at UVA.  Social Entrepreneurship is an additional topic our founder has guest lectured on given our for profit businesses, including EcoChic Boutique.

• If you are interested in receiving our most recent newsletter, please send an email. If you would like to learn more about Managing Love and our parent company, Managing Projects, let’s meet for a cup of fair trade coffee or tea.