Carving Change 2025: Shaping Sustainable Careers

Friday 10th October 2025, Sylva Foundation, Oxfordshire

We’re excited to announce the return of Carving Change, our annual seminar on gender diversity in heritage woodworking and furniture-making.

This year’s theme Recruitment · Role Models · Retention is rooted in our 2024 Sector Survey findings and builds directly on our 2024 seminar’s conversations, where we named the barriers that too often keep women, trans and non-binary people out of the sector. We asked hard questions about access to education, workshop facilities, equal pay and opportunities, the reality of employees needing flexibility around caring commitments, and the prevailing bias in a male-dominated industry.

In 2025 we know Change is happening. This year we ask: How can we sustain that change? What initiatives can help to attract, inspire, and retain underrepresented genders in woodworking and furniture making? What can we learn from related sectors like boatbuilding, heritage craft, conservation, forestry, or construction?

What to expect on Friday

The day brings together industry leaders, educators, and makers to share ideas and shape solutions.

• Two keynotes: one from education, one from industry, on what’s needed to make careers more inclusive and sustainable.
• Cross-sector insights: short talks from related industries tackling similar challenges.
• Hands-on workshops: design-sprint style sessions where participants develop and test implementable initiatives from new entry routes and visibility campaigns to much needed workplace policies.
• Networking: with plenty of space for reflection, connection, and good food.

→ Get your free ticket here

→ Download the event programme here

Makers’ Meet & Zine Making

Saturday 11th October 2025, 10:00am–2:00pm, Sylva Foundation

The day after the seminar, we’re hosting our second Gender Diverse Makers Meet calling all women, trans, and non-binary makers. This is a safe and creative space to connect, an informal gathering to reflect, respond, and create together.

Whether you attended the main event or couldn’t make it, this session is open to all women, trans and non-binary makers who want to explore ideas of representation, visibility, and creative disruption in heritage woodworking and furniture-making.

We’ll open the day by looking at the key emerging ideas from Friday’s event, presented by one or more of our seminar contributors who will be joining us to share reflections and invite responses.

Then we’ll move into a collaborative zine-crafting session, using Sylva’s archive of books, magazines, brochures, and ephemera to unearth and celebrate female, trans and non-binary makers in furniture history and the NOW and document what an inclusive future could look like.

About the zine

Visibility isn’t just about who’s in the room now or who was here yesterday. It’s about who was here, whose stories were never told, lost, or removed and what legacies we carry forward. This session helps us fill in some gaps, connect some dots and build new archives. The zine aims to honour our pioneers, spotlight the craft and skill of hands too often unnamed or uncredited, and celebrate the contribution and perseverance of marginalised makers across time. A visual record that future makers can see themselves in.

You’ll find:

• scanners, cameras, and printers
• collage and block printing tools
• space to share stories and build a living archive together
• tea, coffee, cake, and a BYO picnic-style lunch

This event is free and open to all levels of experience. Children and dependents are very welcome.

→ Get your free Saturday ticket here