Making for Change: Waltham Forest
This report documents the ‘Making for Change: Waltham Forest’ project, which explored ways in which fashion and making can be used as catalysts for positive change and to activate legacies within a community. It reports on a range of activities in relation to education, manufacturing, and community engagement, grounded in the themes of makers, fellowship, and radicals.
This report documents the ‘Making for Change: Waltham Forest’ project led by Dr Francesco Mazzarella in partnership with London College of Fashion (LCF) and London Borough of Waltham Forest (LBWF). Adopting a design activist approach, the project aimed at engaging, through fashion and making, local schools, businesses, residents and hard-to-reach communities in order to develop and retain creative talent in the borough and address issues affecting the community, such as deprived youth, skills shortage, fashion manufacturing decline, and unemployment.
The report starts with an overview of Waltham Forest and its fashion-related activities to set the context and background of the project. It also outlines the methodology that guided the development of this participatory action research project in relation to its main areas of work: education, manufacturing, and community engagement. In the concluding chapter, the overall outputs and outcomes of the project are discussed in relation to the key themes emerging from the research: sustainability awareness, empowerment and skills development, career pathways, community engagement, and partnership building.
ISBN 978-1-906908-60-7