Delivered by Play Nice
At the end of 2020, we awarded Play Nice with the Fusion Prize in partnership with Culture Mile for their cultural incubator programme, The Pattern.
The Pattern was a project that aimed to increase employability opportunities through mentoring and the co-creation of community focused projects. Pairing subcultural leaders whose practices ranged from activists to cultural curators, with a team of five young people looking to grow within the arts, creative and cultural industries. The programme took them through a series of co-creation exercises to research the needs of their communities, design creative solutions using their insights, and activate their work in the real world. Creating real life case studies for them to gain more work in their fields of choice.
The exercises and templates designed by founder of Play Nice, Nate Agbetu can be found below for those looking to engage with research, ideation, curation and production.
The Pattern’s projects have been made by the next generation, for the next generation – showing the capacity of young Londoners to reimagine their futures through innovative and unconventional methods.
‘Gaia’s Garden’, a urban oasis programmed with events highlighting sustainable practices, won Time Out’s ‘Space of the Year’ and countless placemaking awards for activating and innovating a part of central London that had been left bare by the isolating rules of the pandemic. While ‘At The Feet of Our Mothers’ brought to life the sacred scriptures of an islamic hadith, highlighting the martiarchs of the muslim diaspora in the form of a film, publication and launch event. The first of its kind in 180 The Strand, one of London’s newest cultural institutions.
The young people pushed themselves to gain experience as co-curators, photographers, stylists, creative directors, event producers, journalists and publishers through their work. While the programme not only showed that there are equitable ways of kickstarting careers in the arts in a time of austerity; it showed that when you invest in the future, it innovates the now.
The young people at the helm of these projects have gone on to direct brand collaborations, pursue degrees and develop their practices in countless ways. Showing that with resources, pastoral care and an idea, young people can shape a future for London.
There’s no word of a doubt that the funding helped to realise the projects in the real world. But the critical thinking skills and ability to make something as tangible as these projects is within all of us and that’s why Play Nice have made the tools from their workshopping available here for other creative souls.
You can also see the social impact report for the project here and some more on Gaia’s Garden, which was heralded as a one of the key case studies to meet the City of London’s COVID Recovery Policies.