Go, See, Share Fund - Case Study

Our Go See Share Case Study by Clothworks Glasgow CIC  |  Supported by Creative Scotland and the National Lottery

Why We Applied
‍We are Clothworks Glasgow CIC, a social enterprise based in Glasgow’s East End. Our work sits at the junction of craft, education, and community regeneration in one of Scotland’s most economically deprived areas. We have two core objectives: Education through Craft—providing inclusive training that restores traditional skills and promotes lifelong learning—and Opportunity through Making—supporting local people, especially those from marginalised or low-income backgrounds, to access new routes to income, confidence, and connection. That means delivering training in tailoring, pattern cutting, sewing, and textile repair, running community mending sessions, collaborating with local schools, and advocating for circular fashion.We had reached a point where we knew we wanted to expand our education offering and diversify the programmes we deliver, but we didn’t have a clear template for how to do that. The funding landscape for organisations like ours is precarious, and we couldn’t find many peers in Scotland doing exactly what we do. We needed to look further afield.Creative Scotland’s Go See Share fund felt like the right vehicle. It offers between £3,000 and £10,000 for creative individuals and organisations to undertake research trips that expand business activity and improve financial sustainability. The emphasis on sharing what you learn back in Scotland aligned perfectly with our values. If you’re a creative organisation wondering whether Go See Share is right for you, our advice is simple: if there are people doing work you admire and you want to understand how they do it, apply. The conversations we had on these visits gave us more practical insight than months of desk research could have.We chose to visit three organisations operating in broadly the same territory of textiles, education, and social impact, but each with a distinct model: The King’s Foundation’s Future Textiles programme at Dumfries House in Ayrshire, Making for Change at Poplar Works in East London, and La Textilerie in Paris. What follows is what we found.

‍Future Textiles at Dumfries House
‍Our first stop was the closest to home. The King’s Foundation’s Future Textiles programme operates out of a fully equipped textile atelier on the Dumfries House estate in East Ayrshire, about an hour south of Glasgow. Established in 2014 at the initiative of His Majesty The King, the programme was conceived as a direct response to the widening skills gap in the UK fashion and textiles industry—a gap that has only grown as manufacturing has continued its long retreat from British shores. To date, more than 7,000 people have benefited from Future Textiles across the Foundation’s sites at Dumfries House, Highgrove Gardens, and Trinity Buoy Wharf in London.The mainstay of the programme is sewing workshops for secondary school students. Over 600 pupils attend annually, ranging from single-day visits to longer multi-day projects. One principle that emerged early in the programme’s development struck us as particularly powerful: every student must leave with something tangible they have made. This isn’t just a nice touch. Staff told us it’s been one of the most impactful design decisions they’ve made. A physical object becomes proof of capability, something to show parents and peers, a counter-argument to the pervasive sense that making things is a relic of another era. We’ve since adopted this as a guiding principle for our own workshop design.Beyond the schools programme, Future Textiles runs training courses that upskill adults from the local community for work in factory production. East Ayrshire was once dotted with clothing factories; the skills that sustained those communities didn’t disappear when the factories closed, but they aged. The Foundation’s adult programmes represent an attempt to rebuild that muscle memory, equipping a new generation with the competencies the fashion supply chain still demands.Then there are the partnership projects—standalone collaborations with brands such as Amazon Studios, YOOX, Alexander McQueen, Christopher Kane, and Net-a-Porter. These partnerships bring prestige and external funding, but they require constant cultivation. While the Foundation’s institutional backing provides a secure base for the core schools programme, the wider ambitions depend on a perpetual cycle of bidding and relationship management. Even with royal patronage and a decade of history, no textile education programme can afford to stand still.For us, the visit to Dumfries House provided both a benchmark and a dose of realism. The scale of their impact—and the infrastructure required to sustain it—showed us what’s possible, but also underlined the distance between ambition and execution. If you’re an organisation considering a similar visit, we’d encourage you to ask specifically about their funding model and partnership development process. Those were the conversations that gave us the most to work with.

‍Making for Change at Poplar Works, London
‍From the rolling grounds of an Ayrshire estate to the dense urban centre of Tower Hamlets. Making for Change, based at Poplar Works in East London, offered a radically different context but a surprisingly similar set of challenges. A collaboration between Poplar HARCA, the London College of Fashion at the University of the Arts London, and The Trampery, Poplar Works is a fashion workspace and training centre. It also includes incubation units for startup fashion businesses, but Making for Change, the social programme, is what we went to see.The programme was initially established in 2014 for women in prison and has since expanded to serve the wider community of East London. The training is rigorously vocational: participants work toward Level 1 and Level 2 qualifications in fashion and textiles, covering garment construction, industrial sewing machinery, cutting, quality control, and professional practices. Graduates leave with a recognised certificate—a level of formal accreditation we found very instructive. For organisations like ours, the question of whether participants walk away with something officially recognised may matters enormously for their employment prospects.What impressed us most was how thoughtfully the programme is designed around the barriers its participants actually face. Courses are free for those who are unemployed. They run during school hours, so parents can attend without sacrificing childcare. Supplementary ESOL classes support learners with limited English, an acknowledgment that Poplar’s community is among the most linguistically diverse in the country. Without this care and setup the programme simply wouldn’t reach the people it’s designed for.Adjacent to the training programme is a small sampling studio offering full Cut, Make, and Trim services, with all staff paid a minimum of the London Living Wage. Some graduates have gone on to gain employment there, creating a satisfying closed loop between education and economic opportunity. But this is where we encountered one of the visit’s most instructive tensions. The studio struggles to expand because too few designers are willing to pay what it actually costs to produce garments at a living wage. The aspiration to offer regular, dignified employment runs headlong into the hard economics of an industry that has systematically externalised its labour costs. For anyone building a production element into their textile education model, this is a reality worth understanding early.Claire, who runs Making for Change, also spoke candidly about an institutional challenge that will resonate with anyone embedded in a larger organisation. The programme must continually justify its activities within the broader strategic aims of UAL—a world-class institution whose priorities don’t always align with community-facing vocational training in a deprived borough. The programme’s survival depends not only on outcomes but on the ability to narrate them in a language that satisfies institutional stakeholders. That’s a skill many of us in this sector could stand to develop.Making for Change also delivers community-facing sewing activities tied to local events and festivals, relationship-driven programming that emerges from dialogue with the neighbourhood. For the Jubilee, participants made royal-themed outfits—an exercise in communal celebration that doubled as skills development. It’s this kind of nimble, community-responsive work that felt most directly transferable to our own context in Glasgow’s East End. There are at least two detailed case studies on the Making for Change website that we’d recommend to anyone wanting to go deeper.

‍La Textilerie, Paris
‍Our final visit took us across the Channel to Paris’s 10th and 19th arrondissements, where La Textilerie operates a model quite unlike anything we’d encountered in Britain. Part community hub, part secondhand shop, part repair café, La Textilerie describes itself as a creative and solidarity-driven space dedicated to textiles and their multiple lives. That phrase captures both its ecological mission and its essentially optimistic view of what discarded things can become.The operation begins with donations. La Textilerie receives approximately 80 kilograms of unwanted clothing and textiles every week. These are sorted, repaired where possible, washed, and resold through two shops. The focus is squarely on diverting textiles from landfill, an urgent priority in a European context where textile waste is growing faster than almost any other waste stream, but the process generates its own ecosystem of social and educational activity.Volunteers are trained in clothing repair, creating a community of practice around skills that many people assume are lost or irrelevant. Free monthly mending workshops open these skills to anyone, teaching participants to darn, patch, sew buttons, replace zips, and hem garments. These are modest interventions individually, but their cumulative effect is to shift a community’s relationship with its possessions from one of passive consumption to active stewardship. We recognised a strong parallel with our own MEND programme in Glasgow.Where La Textilerie really opened our eyes was in its income generation. Sewing and pattern-cutting classes for home sewers run more than a dozen times each week, generating steady revenue from individuals willing to pay for structured learning. And then there is the corporate offering: mending workshops delivered in workplace settings, pitched as team-building activities with an environmental conscience. This corporate stream, staff told us, has become one of their strongest revenue generators. We immediately recognised this as potentially relevant to our own financial model. What struck us most about La Textilerie was its inventiveness in converting a single core mission, keeping textiles out of landfill, into a diverse portfolio of activities, each reinforcing the others. The shops fund the workshops; the workshops create the volunteers; the volunteers repair the donations; the donations stock the shops. It’s a virtuous circle, though even La Textilerie, for all its ingenuity, has not achieved full financial self-sufficiency. That, as we were about to conclude, is a universal condition.

‍What We Learned
‍Three organisations in three very different settings, a royal estate in rural Scotland, a fashion hub in East London, a solidarity shop in central Paris, and yet the through-lines were remarkably consistent.First, and most sobering: none of the three organisations is financially self-sustaining through the services it offers. Every one depends on external funding, whether from a royal foundation, a university, local government, or a patchwork of grants and partnerships. This is a structural feature of the terrain organisation like ours are in. Social impact work in textiles, work that prioritises community benefit, living wages, and ecological responsibility, cannot currently compete on price with an industry built on externalised labour costs. For those of you reading this who are in the same position, know that the funding is not a crutch. It’s the ground you stand on. And every organisation we visited is standing on the same ground.Second, diversification is not optional. Each organisation offers a range of services and is constantly experimenting with new ones. The King’s Foundation runs schools programmes, adult training, and brand partnerships. Making for Change delivers vocational qualifications, operates a sampling studio, works in prisons, and runs community events. La Textilerie combines retail, repair, education, and corporate workshops. The message for us was a single programme, however excellent, is too fragile a structure on which to build an organisation’s future. Resilience requires breadth.Third, and perhaps most importantly: it is about your community. Every organisation we visited had invested deeply in the relationships, partnerships, and local knowledge that make their programmes responsive and relevant. The King’s Foundation draws on the economic memory of East Ayrshire’s manufacturing past. Making for Change designs its courses around the specific barriers, childcare, language, cost, that its neighbours face. La Textilerie schedules its repair cafés around the rhythms of its arrondissements. It’s the reason the work resonates, and the reason participants return.

‍What This Means for Clothworks
‍The Go See Share visits have crystallised a set of strategic priorities for us. We will now actively explore the corporate workshop model that La Textilerie demonstrated, consider developing plans for formal accreditation pathways drawing on what we saw at Poplar Works, and embed the principle that every participant leaves with something they’ve made into every workshop we design. They’re concrete changes to how we can work better, directly informed by what we observed.More broadly, the visits confirmed that we’re operating in a space with genuine demand and precious few models. The knowledge that every peer shares the same essential vulnerability, dependence on external funding, was in a way liberating. It means the challenge is not unique to us or Glasgow but a systemic condition that requires systemic responses: better funding infrastructure, longer grant cycles, and a policy environment that recognises textile skills as tools of community empowerment, economic participation and environmental stewardship.

‍Advice for Future Go See Share Applicants
‍If you’re considering applying, here’s what we’d pass on. Be specific about what you want to learn. We chose organisations doing variations on our own work, and the specificity of those comparisons is what made the visits so productive. A vague trip to “see what’s out there” would have yielded far less. Prepare questions in advance and share them with your hosts beforehand, they’ll be more generous with their time if they know what you’re looking for.Don’t limit yourself geographically. Our visit to La Textilerie in Paris was arguably the most revelatory precisely because the French context forced us to think beyond our usual assumptions about how textile education and repair services are structured. The Go See Share fund is designed to support international trips, and we’d encourage you to take that opportunity.Finally, think seriously about the “share” element from the start. Sharing what you learn is a condition of the funding, but it’s also, we’ve found, the part that forces you to synthesise what you’ve seen into something actionable. Writing this case study has been, in itself, part of the process of turning observation into strategy.

‍This case study was produced by Clothworks Glasgow CIC as part of our participation in the Go See Share Creative Industries Fund, supported by Creative Scotland and the National Lottery. The Go See Share fund supports individuals, organisations, and creative businesses in Scotland to undertake research trips that explore new ways to expand business activity and improve financial sustainability.

Eastern Ground

In collaboration with local high schools, 'Eastern Ground' facilitated a series of workshops on sewing and natural dyeing techniques.  Led by Alis Le May and natural dyer Julia Billings, the program engaged students in their local heritage.

The nine-month-long project culminated in an immersive exhibition at Strange Field Dalmarnock (Barrowfield Weaving Mill) featuring garments, photographs, wall hangings, and a dance film each inspired by the architecture and stories from local residents.

Six garments were designed to reflect the unique characteristics of six historic buildings in Glasgow's East End. - St Anne's RC Church, Dennistoun 1933   - Templeton Carpet Factory, Calton  1892 - Shettleston Hall (Also known as 'Wellshot Halls'), Shettleston 1925   - Tollcross Winter Gardens, Tollcross 1848 - Olympia Cinema, Bridgeton 1911 - Barrowfield Weaving Mill, Dalmarnock 1889. An accompanying website featured details of all six historic sites and the creative process that had been happening across the project, offering a broader context to the exhibition.

Nine wall hangings created by the students were displayed.
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Support for the project ccame from Glasgow City Heritage Trust, Creative Scotland Holywood Trust, and Clyde Gateway.

Lockdown Make your own Facemask

Limited with what was possible, in person, during the pandemic, we put together a step by step guide to make your own Facemask.

Visible Mending with Ricefield Arts

Ricefield Arts project When Red, Go Green played host to our visible mending workshop with the Speedweve.

The When Red, Go Green project aims to increase climate change awareness and encourage sustainable living in their community.
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Learn more at: ricefieldgogreen.org.uk

MEND for FASHION REVOLUTION DAY.

Glasgow School of Art played host to a wonderful days mending. Lots of people mending for the first time, and with great results.

Fashion Revolution is a not-for-profit global movement with teams in over 100 countries around the world. They campaign for systemic reform of the fashion industry with a focus on the need for greater transparency in the fashion supply chain.

Learn more at: fashionrevolution.org

People Make Christmas

PEOPLE MAKE CHRISTMAS aimed to bring communities together through  workshops and events in Glasgow throughout December 2017.

And on Christmas Day, was a place to come and enjoy the day itself with food, comfort, and company of others.

It was great organising this event and we were fortunate to be recognised with an Epic Award Nomination from Voluntary Arts Scotland.

Find out more about it: peoplemakechristmas.com .

Fingerprints: Empathy Through Stitching

As part of Edinburgh's Festival of Empathy in Edinburgh 2016 we ran a workshop encouraging participants to consider the human workforce behind all our clothes.

Working in teams of two, participants helped each other to make a simple tote bag. As they stitched, teams 'inked' their fingertips so that every touch they made transferred to the bag. Once the bag was complete, each pair swapped their creations, taking away their team-mates fingerprinted bag, and a colourful temporary reminder on their own fingertips.

It was amazing taking part in an Empathy Festival and we'd love to see more happening all over the country.

Learn more about the festival at: Empathy Festival Facebook Page .

All Clothes Are Made By Hand

As part of Fashion Revolution we made a short film on the simple fact that we often revere 'handmade' clothing close to home but ignore the skill Garment Workers across the globe have and employ everyday to make the cheap clothes made for High Street Brands.