This Social Enterprise Employs Refugee Women to Make Sustainable Fashion - The Social Outfit

The Social Outfit is a fashion label with a difference, helping new migrant and refugee women kick-start their Australian careers. They believe in an Australia where refugees and new migrants are warmly welcomed and settle well, celebrating diversity and collective skills and strengths.

Founded in 2014, they utilise a unique organisational model to deliver its mission. The Social Outfit incorporates a DGR-1 registered charity to operate an employment-focused social enterprise that successfully addresses the complex barriers to training and employment faced by newly arrived refugee and migrant women. This hybrid model enables the organisation to prioritise people and impact while creating and selling sustainable fashion products that generate revenue to support their work. The Social Outfit is dedicated to showcasing the skills, creativity, and strengths of refugee and migrant women. They do this through their retail clothing store and ethical manufacturing workroom in Sydney’s Inner West. 85% of their garments are made from fabric diverted from landfill, saving over 14 tonnes to date.

Refugee women have the highest unemployment rates of all disadvantaged groups of people in Australia. To respond to this pressing issue, The Social Outfit's Entry-level Supports include community engagement programs that focus on sewing and textile crafts, enabling participants to build on their existing skills while learning new ones, strengthening their confidence and social connections in a supportive environment. Participants looking to continue developing their skills and/or commit to regular work hours are supported by the team to receive intermediate and intensive support. These supports include more formal training programs, delivered in partnership with TAFE institutions; paid work experience, including the Earn & Learn sewing programs and Retail Training Program; and ongoing employment within the social enterprise in sewing, retail, program coordination, and marketing roles. They also support successful transitions to ongoing external employment.

The Social Outfit programs effectively address barriers to social inclusion, employment and training by:

• Starting from existing skills and interests so refugees and new migrants can contribute, feel valued and build confidence as they learn new skills, which contributes to positive attitudes to learning.

• Meeting the women ‘where they are at’ - we partner with 10+ community and settlement services organisations in Western and South-Western Sydney to deliver a range of programs and pathways, tailored to emerging needs and interests.

• Interacting daily with the broader community creating opportunities for refugee women to practice speaking English and grow their networks.

• Supporting women with 1-to-1 mentoring with the Employment Pathways Coordinator as well as informal supports and referrals to partner services to remove barriers to participation.

• Using a ‘train the trainer’ approach, which creates pathways for new kinds of employment. The Social Outfit's refugee sewing trainers inspire and connect with students through lived experience and mutual understanding, creating a sense of optimism for what might be possible for them in the future.

• Employing the impact measurement framework and entry and exit interviews, which enable them to track, measure and evaluate the efficacy of both programs and individual participant progress. These are used to inform future programming and pathways.

As of the end of 2023, The Social Outfit has trained over 850 and provided employment to 97 women from migrant and refugee backgrounds. For 81% of women who have worked with them, The Social Outfit was their first Australian job. They have a target to achieve 100 employment opportunities and 1000 training outcomes by their 10th birthday in 2024.

The Social Outfit were the winners of the Banksia Foundation's 2024 Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Award, sponsored by L'Oréal, and the 35th National Banksia Gold Award.

Website: thesocialoutfit.org