How we have served our community
Our first full year of trading brought us a fantastic opportunity to run a series of workshops in Newcastle as part of our Story Bocs interactive art project, a successful Kickstarter campaign and a whole host of exciting new collaboration opportunities! Here's the official bit from our CIC34 report, with some nice infographics to spice it up :)
During the financial year 2023-24, we launched a new accessible arts project 'Story Bocs' combining multimedia exhibitions with open workshops to facilitate active participation and start building community connections. This involved the following activities
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A series of 10 workshop sessions culminating in a group exhibition as part of Newcastle City Council's East End High Streets scheme. These were free to attend, we provided all materials and, where hosted in local cafes and pubs, included refreshments. This benefited our community spaces by bringing new people through the door and residents by removing economic barriers to engagement.
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The company then combined the artwork produced by our community with tactile pieces we created (paid for by a Kickstarter crowdfunding campaign) to put on an additional 3 day pop-up show, again with a free, open workshop for the duration. This benefited the community by introducing them to art they were not only allowed but actively encouraged to pick up and play with, breaking down social expectations and anxiety around arts events. We also offered the option of contributing the community's own art and stories to a community 'bocs' which will be taken on tour with us, starting a wider conversation beyond our local area.
Our stakeholders are those in the community who feel excluded from traditional arts experiences. By putting on the workshops, we were able to have lengthy conversations with individuals people about how they perceived the arts, what put them off attending as audiences and participants. In response to this, we have already rewritten our plans for further events to focus much more on making the active aspect central and more welcoming, so it is clear it's not just for people who are already creative. So many people want to communicate, to share their stories and experiences in response to events like ours, but just don't know where to start.
By running our crowdfunder online, we were also able to engage stakeholders who could only interact remotely, which has enabled us to assess and improve the way we help those who face physical barriers – geographical, time, physical disability, to access and benefit from our work.
To facilitate all of this we brought the project to other local organisations that we were introduced to during our events, with whom we are exploring two possible additional options. We started discussions about creating a workshop pack that could be used by organisations in a theraputic setting to allow people to navigate powerful feelings in a creative and positive way. We also began looking at how we could create a walk-in version of our smaller pieces, including augmented and virtual reality to enhance the experience and create a hybrid option that would translate directly into a remote version.
