TAKE A PART CIO

🔥 SOCIAL MAKING 2024: HIGHLIGHT Our host for Social Making 2024 is Bricks Bristol Bricks are a Bristol-based charity working with creative, local and social enterprise communities in and around the South West. They produce public artwork programmes, deliver creative collaborative activities and secure permanent spaces in the city to build sustainable futures. They run St Anne’s House, the venue for Social Making 2024. This fantastic creative and community hub includes rooms to hire, youth projects, community cafe, cooperatively run gym, community sauna, play therapy, social prescribing, artist studios, coworking, artist project space, rehearsal space, wellbeing therapy rooms and ceramic studios. As part of the symposium there will be a social mixer and local showcase event over dinner on the Thursday evening at Bricks - more details to come! 🔥 Social Making: Actions for Agency - Generative Practice During Paradigm Shifts 📅 10th and 11th October 2024 🏢 St Anne’s House, Bricks, Bristol 🎟️ www.socialmaking.co.uk 🙏 Funded by Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation

We have only 44 tickets left now for Social Making 2024: Actions for Agency. This means we sold 65% of capacity in the 8 days since we launched sales. Get your space NOW because this will sell out ASAP!

🏝️ COLIN THE CORMORANT! We’re super pleased and proud to announce that the 'Colin the Cormorant' story co-created by Prince Rock’s Crazy Glue art group and children’s author/illustrator Simon James has been made into a hardback children’s book with an ISBN and EVERYTHING - our first available-to-purchase book made by community members! Generously supported by partners the Plymouth Sound National Marine Park the project, and subsequent book, enabled families to learn new skills in storytelling, creative writing and watercolour and to explore hyper-local spaces, environments and conservation ideas together around their own foreshore of Plymouth Sound and what happens when you care for what you have in your local area. The project was also the jumping-off point for the group taking part in the 2023/2024 MaxLiteracy cohort with Engage, the National Association for Gallery Education. We’re so pleased to see the final book in print, it looks beautiful, and we hope to see copies out and about in Plymouth in the future. 🥰 Huge thanks to the families and Prince Rock Primary School for their commitment to the project and their creativity, and to Simon James Books and designer Joshua Blackwell for supporting the participants and Take A Part to develop the story into such a wonderful piece.

🌿 EXCITING (and gentle) GROWTH! In the past few months, we have worked hard and well and have been able to increase the network of skills and support we have to hand! Check out our expanded team of super talents! Anneliese Kesteven, Lizzie Hilton, Laurel Miller, @Frances Daykin, Joshua Blackwell, Dr Cara Courage SFIPM FRSA, Nicole Redfern, Molly Erin McCarthy Plymouthians, Devon and Cornwall peeps. Keep your eyes peeled for an event in September where we want to talk to YOU about your skills and widening our freelance pool of trusted talents even further! https://lnkd.in/eEbKmr6Y

SOCIAL MAKING 2024 - TICKETS GOING FAST! 🔥 Social Making: Actions for Agency - Generative Practice During Paradigm Shifts 📅 10th and 11th October 2024 🏢 St Anne's House, Bricks, Bristol 🎟️ Click on the link in our bio to book your ticket We've already sold a quarter of our tickets for Social Making, so get booking fast if you want to join us for our exciting two days of talks, workshops, networking and much more at St Anne's House Bricks Bristol. Speakers and workshops from: Kim Wide MBE (Take A Part), Kathrin Böhm (Company Drinks), Anurupa Roy (Katkatha Puppet Arts Trust), Nadia Shaikh (Right to Roam), Ben Borthwick (PRIMEdesign), Daisy Hale (The Hale), Leo Valls (Skate Bordeaux), Mark Teh, Hilary Powell & Daniel Edelstyn, Saad Eddine Said & David Jubb (Citizens in Power), Megan Clark-Bagnall, Anneliese Kesteven & Gemma Ward (TAKE A PART CIO) 🙏 Funded by Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation Book now! https://lnkd.in/eTrnsHGH

👏 IT IS BAAAAAAACK! SOCIAL MAKING 2024 - OPEN FOR BOOKING! 🔥 Social Making: Actions for Agency - Generative Practice During Paradigm Shifts 📅 10th and 11th October 2024 🏢 St Anne’s House, Bricks Bristol 🎟️ Click on the link in our bio to book your ticket Take A Part is delighted to present our fifth biennial symposium Social Making: Actions for Agency - Generative Practice During Paradigm Shifts, taking place on the 10th and 11th of October 2024 at St Anne’s House; Bricks, Bristol. Social Making aims to bring together artists, curators, community members, commissioners, policy makers, audiences, researchers and anyone with an interest in social practice in the arts. For Take A Part, social practice is collaborative and puts people at the heart of the artwork, and it is this spirit that we bring to our symposium. With a global erosion of older and inherited forms of democracy, antiquated and colonial models of funding and economics and urgent forms of climate justice emerging, we need more accountability ourselves and to action what we need. To do this, people need tools to support shifts in practice. Talks and workshops include: ⚡️ Jugaad - The global practice of subversion as a form of radical practice with Kim Wide MBE and Anurupa Roy. ⚡️ How creative enterprise models bring communities greater fiscal equity with Company Drinks (Kathrin Böhm) and Hilary Powell & Daniel Edelstyn. ⚡️ Reclaiming land from white colonial power structures with Right to Roam (Nadia Shaikh) and Mark Teh. ⚡️ How wheeled users can play freely in the city with PRIMEdesign (Ben Borthwick) and Leo Valls. ⚡️ Citizens In Power - Centering citizens in your cultural work with Saad Eddine Said & David Jubb ⚡️ The Hale - Considering Intersectionality in your work with Daisy Hale ⚡️ Blue Sky Thinking with Megan Clark-Bagnall ⚡️ Asset Based Community Development and the Take A Part approach (with our team!) Generously supported by Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation 🔗 We expect tickets to book fast! https://lnkd.in/eTrnsHGH

💰 We are an organisation that works to put EVERY pound and penny we get from funders and through commissioned work right back into the communities we represent and support. Here's how: 👏 We have chosen to never have our own 'home' venue or office. Because we truly want to work in communities with the infrastructures they have to hand and invest in them, we use the infrastructures a community already has. We book community centres, use play parks for events, sit in libraries for surgeries. We don't want to create another space that is separate from those already in a place as community spaces often struggle to sustain themselves. We want community spaces to thrive and survive, so we spend our money on bookings that ensure they have income. 👏 We invest in local talent. We want communities to know the artists, organisations and businesses that are available to them and use them. So we can support a solid and locally invested circular economy. We want people and organisations to be familiar, become known in the community and trusted. We want the communties we work with to know the cultural organisations and how to visit them. Know artists and how to work with them. To build confidence to continue to take up cultural offers by using them. 👏 We buy local. Catering, printing, transport, merch and tech all are locally sourced so they don't come with the environmental impacts of travelling or shipping in and can be sourced again and again. 👏 When we train our team, we train the community. Each time we need to ensure we give our team or freelancers we work with skills in things like Mental Health or First Aid Training, EDI etc, we open our training outwards to other grassroots community organisations, community members etc. If we are paying for training and there are extra spaces for others to learn, we always make them available and free. 👏 When we do something different, we ensure everyone has a chance to learn. When we do bring in outside artists and ideas, we also invest in local producers, or artists, to work alongside them so we retain capacity and skills in the community. We invest in roles within our community to assist or support ensuring external expertise collaborates with local expertise to develop the best outcomes. 👏 When we need something from the community, we pay for their time. Volunteering is vital to our work of course, but if we need stewards at events, articles written or someone to open up a space for us, we pay for it. There is a really critical difference for us between the option to support and the need for capacity and people in the space to help us do the work. We want to bring investment back into the communities and ensure that capacity by paying for important and non-negotiable outputs that help us deliver well. And we want to give employment out readily in the areas we work in where income opportunities tend to be low. It isn't cheap. It isn't easy. But it is all-important.

🎉 TAKE A PART IS 15! 🎉 Reflecting on, as of May, it being 15 years since the founding and developing of Take A Part CIO from a pilot project in Efford to support a community-led and citizen-focussed approach to place-making and socially engaged practice. Since its inception Take A Part has: ⚡️ Supported the establishment of 10 community-led creative social enterprises (in the UK and abroad). ⚡️ Initiated Social Making, the UK's only biennial international symposium dedicated to socially engaged practice. ⚡️ Worked with over 15 schools in the UK on developing community-embedded approaches to creative education. ⚡️ Commissioned over 100 artist via short and longer-term commissions to support community-led creative programming. ⚡️ Supported over 15 cultural organisations to lean into values-driven approaches to supporting community representative and inclusive work. ⚡️ Been case studied and contributed to 6 publications. Take A Part never changed the intent, that dial. Community-first approach to culture is the driver. 😊 We are so proud of what a constant intent brings.

Enews came out this week! Us: Celebrating 15 years of Take A Part! And an update on our work with Barbican Theatre Plymouth's River Plym project. Opps: Engage, the National Association for Gallery Education, Devon Communities Together, Plymouth Octopus POP ideas, Artizan Gallery, Poole Museum, FutureEverything and MORE! 📖 - https://lnkd.in/ehqkV9Ek

👀 Our Enews is out again (and comes every other Monday so you should deffo sign up for it). From us: A little recap on the Astor Park/East End Community Fun Day, sharing our latest talent development call out for the Black Country with Engage, the National Association for Gallery Education and an update on our Democratising Archives trip to The Box, Plymouth to gain an understanding of how their archives work. For the sector: Programmes, jobs and opportunities with @Visual Arts South West, Theatre Royal Bath, TRINITY BUOY WHARF TRUST, Plymouth Octopus(POP), John Hansard Gallery, Tangled Feet Theatre, The Peninsula Trust, @Milfields Inspired. And the article in focus is by our CEO Kim Wide, MBE and @Anurupa Roy looking at the global social arts sector from a UK/Indian lens. Get reading! 🔍 https://lnkd.in/eyxDVBfz