textiles Over time, our funding for textiles initiatives has come to straddle both The Company and Foundation. Recently, as part of our effort to foster continuous improvement in our own governance, we have sought to delineate the distinct, but compatible, purposes of The Clothworkers’ Company and The Clothworkers’ Foundation, respectively. The Foundation has nine Main and Small Grants programme areas, a number of major ongoing Proactive Grants initiatives, and another impending commitment towards Care Leavers. We felt it important to allow The Foundation’s grants team and trustees to dedicate their full attention to these matters, and to consolidate all matters to do with textiles within The Company.
Photograph by Chris Bethell
This decision provides clear guidance for The Company’s modern purpose, which places textiles and trusteeship at the heart of its activities. There are encouraging signs of groundbreaking innovation in textiles
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the clothworkers’ company annual review 2017
Facing page: Weavers at Cockpit Arts, a creative business incubator supported by The Foundation.
(not least at the University of Leeds), and also of investment in the mills that bring this innovation to market. As a result, we felt it was the right time to reaffirm The Company’s roots in clothworking, clarify what direction our enduring interest in textiles should take, and discover how we might have the most meaningful impact on the industry. Therefore, in 2017, we interrogated our Textiles Strategy, an exercise last undertaken in 2012. Previously, our objectives were to: support textile technology and manufacturing in the UK; maintain our support of academic excellence and innovation in technical textiles, traditional textiles, and colour science in the UK; encourage young adults to pursue studies and a career in these fields; selectively support and reward excellence in textile design; contribute to the preservation and accessibility of textile collections of national importance. Over the past decade or more, The Foundation (principally) and Company, between them, have committed more than £11m in textiles-related support, with the
categories of Academic Research and Innovation (42%) and Heritage and Conservation (34%) accounting for the lion’s share (with exceptional grants to the Victoria and Albert Museum and British Museum explaining the latter). In evolving our strategy, we have now committed ourselves to applying our resources to meet the following objectives: prioritising British textiles; focusing on cloth, rather than costume, and on the manufacture of cloth; directing our involvement in textile design towards talented students at higher-rated institutions, with an interest in people who are studying or possess the ability to convert ideas into a product capable of being manufactured as well as an understanding of textile technologies; rigorously exploring prospective usage of equipment that we fund; directing our support in heritage towards cataloguing, indexing, storing, conserving, displaying and improving access to important textile collections and archives. The above objectives also reflect our recognition that fashion and retail industries are too broad and
the clothworkers’ company annual review 2017
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