Creative Space Beirut
Slow Factory has partnered with Creative Space Beirut, a free fashion design school in Beirut serving talented youth from underserved backgrounds, to strengthen long-term support for its work. Slow Factory now serves as CSB’s fiscal sponsor, reflecting a shared commitment to access, sustainability, and the protection of cultural futures, while challenging extractive and exploitative systems.
Rooted in aligned values around equity in education, sustainability, and community-driven practice, this collaboration creates a framework for mutual support, shared learning, and long-term impact.
Through this partnership, U.S.-based supporters can contribute directly to CSB with ease and transparency, with full tax-deductible benefits and the option to set up simple monthly recurring donations.
Creative Space Beirut provides high-quality, free fashion design education and career support to talented youth from vulnerable backgrounds across Lebanon — dismantling socioeconomic barriers and fostering a sustainable, innovative ecosystem where every aspiring creative has the opportunity to thrive.
The students truly are the beating heart of Creative Space Beirut. They come from diverse backgrounds, encompassing a spectrum of vulnerable socioeconomic circumstances across Lebanon, including Palestinian and Syrian refugee communities.
Throughout their enrollment, Creative Space Beirut students are provided with full financial support, including housing, transportation, and supplies. CSB provides a safe space of learning, creativity and productivity that alleviates the emotional distress of its beneficiaries, offering relief and purpose and fostering resilience, community, and change in challenging circumstances.
CSB ensures that creatives from a variety of backgrounds have the opportunity to explore and develop their talents in a supportive environment to nurture their potential to contribute positively to society.
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Creative Space Beirut × Slow Factory Manifesto
Creative Space Beirut and Slow Factory come together through a shared commitment to access, sustainability, and the protection of cultural futures, challenging extractive and exploitative systems. Rooted in aligned values around equity in education, sustainability, and community-driven practice, this collaboration creates a framework for mutual support, shared learning, and long-term impact. It reflects a belief that supporting creative education and cultural production are collective responsibilities, sustained through care, transparency, and continued investment in people and ecosystems.
We believe the creation and preservation of culture is a collective responsibility.
At a time when education systems and cultural institutions across the SWANA region and beyond are under increasing strain, we come together around shared commitments to access, care, sustainability, and the protection of creative knowledge within fragile and uneven systems.
We believe creativity flourishes within inclusive, community-driven structures. Learning thrives where knowledge is shared, supported, and sustained over time, and where education is treated as a public good that strengthens social and cultural life. We commit to approaches that value equity, accountability, and long-term thinking within creative education and cultural production.
Sustainability, for us, is a structural practice.
It is embedded in pedagogy, production, and ecosystem building. It shapes how materials are sourced and reused, how learning environments are designed, and how relationships are maintained across time. Working within ecological and material limits encourages adaptive thinking, care, and responsibility, allowing creative practice to remain responsive to social, economic, and environmental realities.
We understand access and sustainability as interdependent.
Ensuring free and accessible education is essential to building equitable and representative creative fields. Talent exists across all communities, and access to learning enables diverse voices to contribute to cultural production. By sustaining educational models that remove financial barriers, we support creativity as a shared resource and a driver of collective growth.
We see education as an ongoing, collective process.
Learning extends beyond formal study and continues through mentorship, collaboration, and shared practice. Alumni remain active participants within the educational ecosystem, contributing as instructors, mentors, and practitioners. This circulation of knowledge strengthens local creative economies and fosters continuity through relationship and shared responsibility.
We understand creative practice as a form of social engagement.
Teaching, creating, and sharing knowledge within contexts shaped by political, economic, and environmental precarity carries ethical responsibility. Safeguarding cultural education contributes to the preservation of craft, knowledge, and future possibility, ensuring that creative practices remain grounded, responsive, and socially accountable.
Through this partnership, we affirm the importance of collaboration that is transparent, accountable, and rooted in mutual care. Building connections across geographies allows knowledge to circulate while remaining attentive to local contexts and lived realities.
