The Shoes Off Collective (SOC) is a community of Asian-identifying creatives who connect through in-common diasporic experiences. In addition to connecting through culture, art, design, identity, activism, and social issues, we hang out together, eat together and create together.
Shoes Off began as a student-led collective based in OCAD University. The group was formed to gather lost students who felt the yearn for their Asian communities, seeking cultural connection but didn’t know where, how, or who to start with. The two founders, Loanne II Tran and Emerald Repard-Dennison met in 2018, both unsure of their fitting within the Asian community. In 2021, they both wanted to connect with a sense of community and decided to begin with each other. Emerging out of online schooling due to the COVID-19 pandemic, they started this student group and from there, the community has grown to have engaged dozens of artists and designers across disciplines, inside and outside of OCAD.