Today the Foundation welcomes the Royal Society of Arts (RSA) to its network as a Partner, following a long-standing relationship dating back to 2011. The partnership will aim to significantly spread the idea and practice of circular design across both networks, create an empowered community, and ultimately drive global change.
The partnership focuses on advancing the circular design agenda and educating and engaging communities around the topic of circular design. This will be done by co-creating tools, resources, events, and projects to inspire designers, increase understanding and encourage day-to-day practice.
The RSA has been at the forefront of significant social impact for over 250 years, but more recently, the society has played an important role in supporting the circular design movement - seeking ideas and solutions to design challenges and building up a unique community of over 30,000 fellows.
The Foundation has successfully delivered on several design projects with the RSA, in particular, a two-year partnership with the Foundation’s Make Fashion Circular initiative, which saw £1 million awarded by players of People’s Postcode Lottery. The partnership focused its efforts on building tools and directly engaging with design institutions, the next generation of design talent, and innovators to inspire them to reimagine products, business models, and systems for a circular economy. The project dramatically scales awareness and gives a clear understanding of the benefits that applying circular design brings to fashion.
We are looking forward to increasing the ambition level among our networks and communities through this partnership and encouraging a movement towards embedding circular design as the norm.
To celebrate our formal partnership and convene our global communities around the topic of circular design, on Thursday 11th March the Foundation and RSA are hosting 'Partnership for Change: A community networking experience'. The open-access event will introduce our work in progress and explore stories from across our network of design practitioners.