The Clothes Horse - strengthening our community

Our vision is to see positive environmental choices at the heart of family lives in Cornwall. Our mission is to reduce the environmental impact of maternity, baby, children and youth clothing by connecting and strengthening our community. 

We are a Cornish environmental organisation promoting a circular clothing economy - gathering stocks of specialist preloved and surplus clothing, enabling re-use, challenging ideas, encouraging inclusivity and strengthening communities. 

We have built up a strong reputation throughout Cornwall and are known for our accessibility, inclusivity and our specialist circular approach to keeping clothes in the community and out of landfill. We have built up great connections with our customers and for many we are their 'go to' for getting good quality clothes for their family whilst helping the environment. 

We understand the importance of keeping clothes in the community and how best to do this using our services. Our volunteers are skilled in sorting and displaying quality clothes so that our goods challenge, inspire, educate and bring joy. We are experienced in providing aged 6 hypoallergenic, thermal purple leggings with sparkly unicorns when asked!

We will use this funding to strengthen our organisation - improve customer access, widen our community networks, deepen our volunteer offerings and better monitor our impact. - Funding will make The Clothes Horse accessible to more rural people in Cornwall who face public transport barriers through our postal service, online stylist consultations and community pop-ups. - Funding will expand our community partnerships by improved marketing, increased community pop-ups and focused environmental networking. - Funding will support all aspects of our volunteer programme - improve recruitment practices, develop further training opportunities, provide improved volunteer management & supervision and provide expenses to enable volunteers to further develop our services and networks. - Funding will be earmarked for strategic development, organisational support, training and tools to better monitor and demonstrate our impact. 

The Clothes Horse is built on our communities lived experience of participating in positive environmental action. Expanded caring responsibilities of growing families often mean that people are at risk of becoming isolated from others, financially stretched and feeling that their ability to be part of positive environmental change is ‘too small’. Our emphasis on building and strengthening ‘The Clothes Horse Community’ enables us to support communities to reduce isolation, pool resources, join together and make real change. While we go on this journey with our community, we take care to steward our resources, demonstrate our impact and challenge perceptions.

The Clothes Horse is community designed, developed and led. The Clothes Horse developed from community discussions between the founder and her peers. Chantal, the founder, had been gifted clothes by friends and family since she was first pregnant with her eldest son and had always found it such a lovely and generous thing to do - a practical way of actively showing love and thinking of someone else. Recognising that her youngest son was outgrowing so many of his clothes, Chantal had the realisation that other people often didn’t have family or friend networks or the mechanism for clothes exchanges. Chantal continued to think and pray about the idea and realised that this was something she wanted to make a reality. Chantal started small in her loft at home with community donated clothes and when she met someone needing clothes she would go in the loft and get a package ready for people to collect. Soon Chantal’s loft was full and a larger premises was found. 

The Clothes Horse continues to work alongside our community at all levels to devise, deliver and monitor our development. We are constantly in discussion with our community in person and via conversations on social media, for example it was our customers feedback that developed the children's area as the safe and creative space it is today. We pride ourselves on being volunteer led, developing opportunities that strengthen, enable and sometimes challenge our volunteers to try out new things, take responsibility for key aspects of project development and showcase their abilities. 'I now have a reason to get up and do something, I feel that I have a purpose now that I volunteer here’ says one of our longest volunteers. We have carried out online questionnaires with potential customers, had discussions with local family service providers and worked alongside local environmental partners to better align our services to their networks. 

We are currently developing our postal service and tailor our offer to individual families by triailing an online 'stylist appointment' system with a community focus group to see how we might best support families and carers within more rural, or outlying areas of Cornwall to access our services. We listen to, and explore, what our community shapes through our partnerships with grassroot organisations throughout Cornwall. We maintain a level of trust and respect that is based on equity and builds on the strengths, leadership and assets of others. 

We listen to our volunteers and they often steer how we organise clothes at The Clothes Horse. This includes the shop layout and most recently adding pre packaged clothes bundles for families who cannot stay long to browse. During lockdown we looked at ways that we could still get clothes out to families and through asking our community we started to post out parcels to families. Our volunteers have helped us to develop and improve this service.  Our postal service allows us to better serve the rurality of Cornwall.

We encourage, educate and enable people to make positive environment choices by guiding our community to return outgrown clothes to us so that they can be appropriately reused again in the community. By swapping their clothes for ours enables our community to come back time again and get clothes that they need for each season, growth spurt and occasion all whilst reducing their environmental impact. 

We are seeing the value and importance of offering quality food surplus out to communities across Cornwall as a way to reduce food surplus and we believe that The Clothes Horse is offering something similar with clothing. We are offering the community the opportunity to get quality clothes for their families which is helping the environment by reducing clothes surplus and clothes going to landfill in an affordable and accessible way. We are actively enabling our families to experience that sustainable options may be both better for the environment and the wallet whilst challenging the stigma that can sometimes be attached to secondhand or surplus clothing.