Delivered by Idea Space
In 2022, we are supporting Idea Space’s The Unseen Local project through our Connecting People and Places Fund’s Collaborative Commissions 2022, co-funded by City of London as part of our Foundations Programme.
The Unseen Local project is about offering equality and diverse creative learning opportunities to local young people and giving them access to make meaningful change in their community while developing artistic skills that can add to employability and pathways into further education.
These commissions will unlock further understanding on how creativity can be used to deliver arts, education, employment programming that provides creative learning opportunities, employment and leadership roles, training and fusion skills development.
They also share a commitment to developing equity in their project’s design and delivery, supporting underrepresented people’s ideas and visibility.
The Unseen Local project is about offering equality and diverse creative learning opportunities to local young people and giving them access to make meaningful change in their community while developing artistic skills that can add to employability and pathways into further education.
We would aim to work with 10-15 local youth participants and three to five local businesses or community groups whose important work we would like to showcase.
These community partners include:
The Farm: a cafe run by volunteers, which also feeds local families in need of support
Cann Hall Women’s Foundation: a local support group for vulnerable women
The Man Den: a community group providing mentoring for black boys through playing board games.
The project will be led by Idea Space and co-directed by the young people and the community partners. It will involve discussions on issues relevant to the community to help co-develop and create collaborative work right from the start. This will lead onto artist-led workshops that teach creative and technical skills in digital media such as apps and programmes like Canva, Procreate and sound and film editing programmes.
The skills learnt will then be directly used to connect with and help to celebrate local businesses and community groups in the Cann Hall area by making useful flyers, gifs or short promotional films. The young people will see how their skills make direct enhancements to local businesses and community organisations.
In an exchange for their skills they would then have the opportunity to use these community spaces to showcase their personal work which will be created later on in the project development. These locations such as shop windows, cafes and community halls would create an arts trail in the Cann Hall area that local people would also benefit from. ‘Unseen Locals’ will provide high street businesses, community groups and most importantly the young people with more visibility.
For more information, see ideaspace.org.uk