Case Study: The Social Outfit - fundraising, partnerships and systems change
Pay What It Takes (PWIT) has commissioned a series of case studies featuring not-for-profit (NFP) leaders that aim to explore their experiences and insights regarding the PWIT movement. Each case study will focus on the journey, challenges and successes encountered in introducing, adopting and implementing PWIT principles, practices and resources.
In this interview, Amy Low, CEO of The Social Outfit, and Pay What It Takes Ambassador, talks about how the organisation approaches the Pay What It Takes philosophy in fundraising, partnerships, and systems change. The conversation links Amy’s experience in fashion, sustainability and social enterprise to broader challenges in the not-for-profit sector relating to costs, fundraising and achieving impact.
Case Study Summary
In this case study, Amy Low, CEO of The Social Outfit and Pay What It Takes (PWIT) Ambassador, shares why acknowledging the true cost of impact is essential for creating lasting social change.
Drawing on her experience across fashion, sustainability, social enterprise and philanthropy, Amy explores the parallels between the fashion industry and the not-for-profit sector, where the real costs of delivering outcomes are often hidden or undervalued.
Amy explains why financial stability is fundamental to achieving an organisation’s mission. She discusses how flexible, multi-year funding enables organisations to focus on long-term outcomes and systems change, rather than constantly managing short-term funding uncertainty.
The interview explores Pay What It Takes as both a mindset and a practical framework. Amy reflects how the PWIT Cost Calculator 2.0 helps organisations identify and articulate the full costs of delivering impact, while also enabling important internal and external conversations about sustainability, costs transparency and organisational priorities.
Amy provides valuable insights into building stronger relationships with funders, highlighting the importance of trust, openness and partnership. She contrasts traditional grant processes with more collaborative funding relationships that invite discussions about what programs truly cost and what organisations need to succeed.
Amy also discusses the challenges of mission drift, the risks of chasing underfunded opportunities, and the role boards play in supporting sustainable decision-making. Amy shares practical examples of how The Social Outfit has become more selective about funding opportunities and how greater clarity around true costs has strengthened both governance and organisational focus.
The case study concludes with Amy’s practical advice for organisations beginning their Pay What It Takes journey. She encourages leaders to use the Cost Calculator 2.0, involve their boards and teams in conversations about true costs, and embrace transparency with funders. Amy also issues a call to action for both funders and not-for-profits to actively participate in the Pay What It Takes movement and help build a more sustainable and effective social sector.
“Pay What It Takes is a movement, and this movement requires active
participation. Active participation means engaging as many people as possible
so that they are aware that this movement has traction!”
Introducing The Social Outfit
The Social Outfit is a social enterprise and charity. We employ and train refugees and migrants in fashion and retail. The Social Outfit operates a fashion brand, a retail store, garment manufacturing, and skills training for refugee and migrant women. We have a store in Sydney and that’s also where we make our clothes.
We’ve been based in New South Wales since 2014 and in that time employed more than 130 refugee and migrant women. We’ve trained over 1,000 women and paid more than $2.5 million dollars in wages directly to refugee and migrant women.
We aim to be these women’s first job and also to provide the support and industry partnerships that enable them to obtain a second.
When we talk about economic empowerment of women, it’s direct, it’s designed for them, and it’s about removing the barriers that refugee women face in accessing employment in Australia.
Amy speaks about her connection to Pay What It Takes
“People and organisations are doing a lot with very little and are continually put under pressure because of that.”
My personal connection to the principles and values of Pay What It Takes is embedded in acknowledging the way that financial stability enables systems change to happen.
When you’re tackling big mission or purpose-based work, being really true to what the real costs are of that work and having funding for those costs, is really vital.
Pay What It Takes principles resonate because of my background in fashion and sustainability, where the true cost, meaning the social cost, the environmental impact cost, and also the production costs, are very opaque.
There’s a real overlap in what the fashion industry and not-for-profits are facing in acknowledging the true costs of doing what they do. Making costing less opaque and being transparent about the real cost of operations while creating meaningful outcomes, offers an opportunity to actually disrupt the system. More than proving a point, it becomes something that could be embedded in a new way of operating.
There are a lot of myths within the fashion industry, and I’ve been surprised to see these exist also within not-for-profits.
I think that the more people understand that in fashion human hands are involved in garment production, the more understanding about environmental impact and also about the possibilities for impact created through self-expression, creativity, and craftsmanship of fashion.
But we’ve really kind of flattened the value of that. In going for the lowest price possible, it’s become commonplace to compare the value of a t-shirt that’s $5 and then wonder why a t-shirt might cost $100. And there has been a kind of race to the bottom to compete on large volume, but at the cost of labour and at the cost of access to economic empowerment for the people who exist in the fashion industry.
We’re at an inflection point, I think. The Pay What It Takes mindset is acknowledging that some of the things that we expect are going to happen because they have in the past, may not continue without an acknowledgement of what those true costs are, and without that transparency. People and organisations are doing a lot with very little and are continually put under pressure because of that.
For me, Pay What It Takes values are just common sense.
I have started my own business. I have worked in the corporate sector. And my own professional experience tells me that whenever you’re putting together a new strategy, you have to have a business case setting out what resources are required to achieve a result.
Pay What It Takes as a framework, is a necessary process of acknowledging the resources required to make something work. The second part of that is there’s a level of independence, trust or confidence that you can have about a result when you have the resources and the backing to be able to do it the right way.
Collaborative philanthropic partnerships drive better results
“The challenge of Pay What It Takes conversations is that you have to have them in a trusted relationship where there is the opportunity to explain what is going on behind the scenes.”
I have found it really eye-opening and at times uncomfortable to put a financial value on an outcome when it relates to people. In the commercial sector, there’s a very clear cost of a product that’s easy to research and compare. You know what your competitive edge is and are clear about who your customer base is.
But when it comes to philanthropy and funders, it’s very difficult to determine who is interested in your work, at its cost, and how much funders are prepared to spend, or commit, to gain the outcomes your organisation can achieve.
In the case of The Social Outfit, we’re about getting a woman access to her first job. And asking for money to change someone’s life by providing them access to a job, where the funder isn’t the beneficiary of this spend – they’re not an employer, or a person who’s going to benefit directly – adds a third party into the mix. And for me, the discomfort is about putting a value on an outcome that is inherently connected to a person’s value.
Sometimes a funder’s motivations aren’t as clear, and the give and take of the exchange we’re offering as a NFP aren’t clear. In contrast with the commercial environment, there is a clear exchange. You know what you can negotiate on, you understand what value you can create and who has an interest in taking up that value.
When it comes to philanthropy, it’s about partnership and collaboration, and that’s the shift. And so then when there is a financial component (having to put a dollar value on something) defining that financial component can be murky.
And when you know inherently that you’re competing with other organisations who are doing similar things to you, or that there are other ways a funder might be looking to create impact with their capital, it can be very uncomfortable to look at the comparison of the number of people you can reach and the true cost of creating that impact. So your instinct is to go back to a formula where we say – okay if we take the number of people we can help and make the cost of achieving impact slightly lower – does that make it more appealing? Will that get us over the line? Even if it doesn’t reflect the real cost of the work?
Because NFPs are so driven by mission we can often choose to make a start with what we’re able to get from funders, rather than having an even more uncomfortable conversation where we’re giving them the full picture that shows in reality, it actually costs double.
One of the interesting things about being involved in the Pay What It Takes movement is that it is distinctly different to how you would approach the traditional grant funding rounds where there are clearly defined parameters, and it’s intentionally designed to be efficient and competitive.
At the moment there is such great competition for public grants, and you’re so far away from having a trusted conversation with the grant maker, that you can’t even insert within the 200-word answer what you’re including and what you’re not including, or why you’ve determined and framed a particular program a particular way and connected it to an outcome.
In more traditional funding mechanisms you often don’t get the opportunity to include context within a report. Because it’s about word count, it’s about quantity, it’s about numbers of people; it’s all of those different things.
So there’s a real disconnect between what the grant maker is interested in and what you, as a grant seeker, have the ability to convey within a form, and the whole thing is being assessed by very distinct criteria. And I completely understand that that is a necessary process because of structure and resources on the grant maker’s side, and also the desire to have a process that is accessible and equitable.
The challenge of these Pay What It Takes conversations is that you do have to have them in a trusted relationship where there is the opportunity to explain what is going on behind the scenes and to reveal things that you may not have included in a budget, yet which are clear dependencies for a project or a program to succeed.
When you can have those conversations, you can build trust and openness in a funder relationship. It is a partnership and there’s so much more that you can do together when you can say: we are seeing this thing happening for our cohort and we would like to adapt because we believe we can strengthen an outcome.
Creating long-term value through a Pay What It Takes approach
“We can convene stakeholders, including funders, to have more progressive conversations, leading to increased meaningful impact and change.”
Our confidence in our outcomes is connected to our expertise in creating employment and training pathways for refugee women.
So with funders interested in the economic participation of refugee women, we’re not debating whether our program can achieve outcomes, rather we’re exploring what changes are needed in the current environment and in the current system for more women to overcome their barriers to participation.
We play a dual role in systems change and in creating positive outcomes which allows us to bridge sectors. We can also convene stakeholders, including funders, to have more progressive conversations, leading to increased meaningful impact and change.
Where funders are actively involved in a particular area, they bring their own insights into the change they want, including from research and from the organisations they’re funding or from their Board.
So together we might ask: how do we do this? What are the ways that one organisation is tackling challenges that we could learn from to be more effective or efficient, or deliver stronger outcomes? How does our role in the settlement journey play out and how does the value we create deliver impact for the broader community?
Developing philanthropic success through Pay What It Takes
“Having the Pay What It Takes framework gave me the confidence to be more open in sharing the scenario we were facing and our reality – if we don’t get funding, we won’t be able to do our work.”
Becoming CEO of the Social Outfit was a really energising and positive experience, but also it was a steep learning curve.
One of the areas that I had very little experience in was philanthropy and fundraising. I spent a lot of time in my first year learning how the sector works. At the same time, The Social Outfit was facing the end of several multi-year grants, and a funding cliff, to use a phrase that I came to know far too well last year. So that was really challenging because I’d not experienced that previously.
I was learning as I was going and being told constantly that fundraising is really hard. There are not as many grants, they’re all really competitive, and securing the funds you need is going to be really challenging. And I had very few leads for new funders.
What was really helpful was having access to key people from our Board and our long-term supporters who shared their insights and their networks. This help enabled me to have a better understanding of what strategic philanthropy looks like.
Where I was able to apply my professional experience was in more clearly articulating the value we’re creating around what is the unique thing that we contribute? That if we were to disappear who would miss what we’re doing? My understanding of where we create value, meant I could have different kinds of conversations with different stakeholders including those who had been involved in our work, or shown interest in the past, but who couldn’t see currently how our work aligns with their own ambitions for change.
Having the Pay What It Takes framework shifted the conversations. It gave me the confidence to be more vulnerable and open in sharing the scenario we were facing and our reality which was, if we don’t get funding we won’t be able to do our work. I could talk about the funding that we need to cover our costs and that without it we were going to have to rationalise, stop some of what we were doing, and think about alternative options.
The framework helped us to have difficult conversations, because it’s about asking for multi-year funding and untied funds, and these enable an organisation to manage uncertainty in the environment. With this type of funding we can focus on outcomes rather than only financial stability, and it changes the kinds of decisions that you can make as a CEO. When you find those trusted partners who you can have these conversations with, it’s such a powerful unlock.
Beginning these types of conversations in 2025 helped us to secure funding at the very end of 2025, and that gave us a lifeline. The next step for us is to expand and right now, we’re actively seeking multi-year funders. We’re confident about where we’re going towards 2030 and what type of funders could be engaged in our work and on our journey.
How Boards engage with Pay What It Takes
“We won’t apply for grants where there’s insufficient acknowledgement of true costs.”
There was a real openness from our Board to consider how we attract the kinds of funders that we need for our strategy.
I’ve found that Pay What It Takes engages board members in different ways. People from commercial backgrounds have the same view on how to define costs or read financial documents. People with philanthropy experience have always been challenged by how programs are defined and their cost.
One of the things we’ve changed is being really considered before applying for a grant. Our Board has clarity around which of the different board grant opportunities that I get forwarded, and when we say no and when we consider applying.
We won’t apply for grants that require a new program and where there’s insufficient acknowledgement of true costs. Or where we have to design a whole program in addition to our core work. These would stretch our resources in ways that aren’t contributing to our mission.
I have learned how important it is to set goals and be really clear about determining your priorities and how the work contributes to success. And how your mission is relevant for the future.
So to go back to what I said earlier about what kinds of grants we say no to. In defining who we are and what we do well, we avoid mission creep. Having that shared understanding with the Board means all of us are focused on what makes sense rather than chasing down opportunities that come across our desks, but which don’t make sense because they carry hidden resourcing costs that don’t contribute to an outcome we want to own. Instead, they will take us down a different path and away from our focus.
With clarity and alignment on priorities, it allows me as CEO to make decisions within the organisation operationally that I know the Board will understand and endorse. The kinds of crossroads decisions that you often need the Board to weigh in on become fewer and fewer.
How implementing Pay What It Takes helps staff see their contribution
“Because Pay What It Takes acknowledges direct and indirect costs, it gives people a way to understand [they’re] contributing to outcomes.”
When I first became CEO, one of my observations was that our work was being described very differently by different people in our organisation. It changed depending on where people sat within the organisation.
But because Pay What It Takes acknowledges direct and indirect costs it gives people across the organisation a way to understand that wherever you sit within our operations, you’re contributing to our outcomes.
People can see that pure program costs are not the only costs that contribute to mission. And that is helpful; it has very subtly shifted the way that people connect with both the fundraising component of the work, and the impact outcomes that are achieved.
How funders improve organisational outcomes by paying what it takes
I’m really pleased to share my experience as an ambassador for Pay What It Takes and to be transparent about how paying what it takes has value for not-for-profits.
As an ambassador, the priority group to influence is funders. I’d like to share what it’s like as a grant seeker and how willing we are to listen, learn, partner and demonstrate the commitment we have towards the meaningful outcomes that funders care about.
As a social enterprise, The Social Outfit exists within three really challenging environments. The first is the highly dynamic retail environment which includes the challenge of keeping customers engaged, of making and delivering a high-quality relevant product, and marketing it so it attracts people’s attention and they buy.
Then there’s the commercial challenge of garment manufacturing, which is wholesaling, but it’s also contract manufacturing and production, and all the different technologies and staffing that need dealing with on that side.
And The Social Outfit is also doing job skills and training, including recruiting students, doing the onboarding, then placing them into second jobs. That’s something very few schools take on, but we do it. We connect students with a job and then take them to their job interview, giving them all the details to make sure they show up to that first shift.
And we do all of these different things in a people-centred way whilst also fundraising to continue our programs. We could achieve more effective results if we spent less time seeking funding and justifying our costs, and more time addressing the barriers faced by refugee and migrant women.
So my message to funders is, if you back us to do the work, we will be able to do it very effectively. And we will be more dynamic and responsive to the market, and we will chase down every opportunity. But it’s hard because we’re also constantly chasing down capital to be able to fund our work.
Amy’s advice for implementing Pay What It Takes
“The value of the Cost Calculator is it gives you a structure to see what a program really costs”
I really encourage any grant seeker or not-for-profit organisation to use the Pay What It takes cost calculator, to spend some time with it, and to bring the right people in your organisation into the room to have a good look at what the real costs are of any program you run.
It is uncomfortable to fill in the Pay What It Takes cost calculator and think, oh my gosh, this is way more than I can feel good about putting on a page in a grant application. But that discomfort doesn’t mean that costs are going to reduce.
Appreciating the full costs is also acknowledgement that if the program is important enough – if the work is important enough – you need to find the money and find the people who value that work.
So that’s probably the first piece; it is uncomfortable, but also you can’t play around with the numbers. That’s the value of the cost calculator because it gives you a structure to see what it really costs. It is such a helpful prompt because there are hidden costs or unacknowledged costs that often there’s a real reticence to include.
I would advise someone in my role to bring the board along with you as you’re sitting with the Pay What It Takes toolkit. This needs to be something that you don’t do just once, but that you revisit ongoing.
I would also advise not to be afraid of having uncomfortable conversations with others. And as you sit with that discomfort about the true cost, invite others into that conversation. Ask for help and don’t shy away from sharing that information because there are others who are having the same conversations in other organisations. Funders are having those conversations and are challenging their boards to have the same conversations.
So Pay What It Takes is known as a movement, and this movement requires active participation. And active participation means engaging as many people as possible so that they are aware that this movement has traction!”
