Educator’s Handbook Published

We have now published the Educator’s Handbook, which is the first major output of the CREATE project. The handbook is a summary of key, theoretical and practical knowledge covered in our training divided by topic. Each partner of the project contributed to the handbook with their specific expertise in the field.

The topics tackled in the handbook are:

1. Onboarding and belonging
   Introduction to the project, discussing with students on their needs and expectations. Introduction to collaboration models.

2. Personal growth, power of community and empowerment
   How can cultural heritage and local communities be a source of empowerment and inspiration? Discussing inclusive society and industry and managing online and offline balance.

3. Co-design, circularity, materials and design
   Introduction to circular economy. Guide on how to create a sustainable garment at the stage of choosing materials and designing a fashion piece.

4. Produce capsule, pattern designs, zero-waste tailoring
   The next parts of project development and production. Guidelines for creating a sustainable business model.

5. Business, alliances and go-to-market
   Explores business models and other ways in which marginalised women can turn their capsule collections into a long-term initiative or enterprise with the mission of providing employment for other marginalised women.

6. Marketing Primer
   Collects a set of practices and insights on how to market the co-creative initiatives and the capsule collections to maximise their impact or improve sales that can boost their mission of providing opportunity for more marginalised women.

All of the topics are complemented by case studies that add real-life experience and best practices to the theoretical content of the Handbook. The aim is to provide a framework for educators, designers, or other interested parties, to devise collaborations between refugee or other women from vulnerable groups and designers that utilise fashion as an empowerment, capacity-building and employment tool. In essence, the Handbook lays the theoretical foundation and covers necessary skills in a manner that can be used by professional educators as well as designers or other parties active in providing equal opportunity to marginalised women by the means of sustainable fashion. It will be accompanied by an Educational Toolkit which lays out practical training sessions, exercises and the like. Together, these resources make an easily implementable training programme which can be adapted and replicated in many different contexts as the first step in building the capacity and skills needed by groups which otherwise lacking employment and education opportunities to improve their employment chances and their livelihoods.

The Educator’s Handbook can be found here. The Educational Toolkit that accompanies the handbook will also be published on the website, so check back in again soon!