Maya and Mica Caine

Maya and Mica Caine are twin co-founders of Helix, a new paradigm for fashion that reimagines clothing as a shared civic resource and advances regenerative, place-based systems of stewardship and circularity.

Maya is a life-affirming solutions strategist and architect of post-growth futures. Prior to graduate school, she worked in corporate strategy, including as an enterprise strategist at Nike. She later left corporate America to focus on building pathways toward shared prosperity and ecological regeneration through the apparel and textile industry. At the Yale School of the Environment, where she earned a master of environmental management, Maya developed “A City Blueprint for Building a Slow Fashion Commons,” a framework for city-based fashion stewardship. She is also the author of the “Life-Affirming Venture Design Journal,” a reflection on entrepreneurship that examines the limitations of conventional venture models and explores alternative ownership, governance and business models.

Mica is an artist, activator and strategist focused on climate resilience. A graduate of MIT’s Department of Urban Studies and Planning, she focuses on community wealth building, decentralized energy systems, and Black diasporic history and folk art. Prior to graduate school, she worked as a product manager for trust and safety at Pinterest and served as a neighborhood area commissioner in Columbus, Ohio. Her work has focused on advancing community-owned virtual power plants, local governance and workforce development as pathways to democratic ownership and local resilience. Her research explores how Black diasporic traditions and community-led stewardship can inform repair and regeneration following social and ecological disruption.