Creative Commissions in Balsall Heath

It’s been a busy few months in Balsall Heath with Arshad and our community commissioning panel members running organising different events.  Here are some of the highlights.

Back in June the first of the West Indian cultural group events took place, with an evening of music and conversation held at Balsall Heath’s Printworks.  Derek filmed bits of the evening’s activities, including this blues jam featuring Cornelius on bass:

Derek has been doing a lot of filming for the group and we roped him in to help with our second Poetic Transect.  He and Chris Jam have been out and about in Balsall Heath, talking to people about the neighbourhood, collecting stories and verse.  A new film will be online soon.

Meanwhile the new “Balsall Heath travel agency” has organised two major trips.  A few weeks ago the group took a couple of coaches down to London to give people a chance to visit the South Kensington Museums (and to disappear off to Hyde Park to go on the paddle boats in the Serpentine!).

The intercultural tour of the V&A looking at Islamic arts went down particularly well with group members exploring their heritage.

Last weekend Arshad & I had a day trip up to the Lake District to visit the group who were staying at the Priestley Centre near Coniston.  This was a women-and-children-only trip and was the first time in the Lake District for many of the group.

The Priestley Centre offers lots of outdoor activities and it was great seeing all the fun the kids were having swinging through the trees.  The group who went out on Lake Coniston in a canoe came back very enthused about the history of the area wanting to find out more about the Bluebird as well as visit Brandtwood, John Ruskin’s house overlooking the water.

In other news, the football tournament will be starting in a couple of weekends’ time. Naseem, who has been organising this, was showing off the newly arrived kit when we went to see him at his shop yesterday.

It’s been a really exciting time watching this all come together through the hard work and dedication of commissioning panel members.  And there’s still more activities to go over the next few months in Balsall Heath…

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Ideas4Ordsall Highlights: Laura’s Billboard

Laura is a local parent and worker at Ordsall Community Arts. She used to think that there was ‘nothing going on’ in Ordsall but after getting involved in the project she changed her mind.

The University of Salford project team commissioned Ordsall Community Arts to find out about cultural activities in the local area and OCA recruited 6 local people to spend time in the community talking to people and finding out what’s on. As they asked questions, looked at adverts and posters in windows, on noticeboards and online and listened via ‘word-of-mouth’, the community researchers realised that there was ‘loads going on’ in the area.

Laura was one of the community researchers and she got really excited about sharing and communicating ‘what’s on’ to her friends and neighbours. As a local parent, she is always out and about in the community anyway so it is easy for her to let people know. She started talking to people about their activities and set up a Facebook Group called On in Ordsall which now has 555 members (as of 3rd Sept 2015).

When the project funding came available to support the development of local people’s ideas, Laura proposed a public billboard in the Ordsall Park area for posters and info about local activities and events. After a number of false starts and waiting for people to get back to her, she was delighted when the Ordsall Community Allotments agreed she could put up a board on their fences.  Laura worked with local artist, Marie (another Ideas Person who has put beehives in the allotments), to create a fabulous board that can be updated regularly.

Laura’s launch of the billboard was featured on Salford Online.

Lots of people thank Laura for sharing info about events and activities that they otherwise wouldn’t realise were happening. People stop and read the Billboard regularly and also stop and chat to Laura about what they are doing.

Cultural activities only work if people know about them! Laura’s billboard and Facebook group is making sure that happens in Ordsall… Well done Laura 🙂

New Book: Creative Economies, Creative Communities

Saskia and I were delighted last week to receive the first copies of our latest edited book, published by Ashgate.  Creative Economies, Creative Communities came out of a conference session that we organised at the Royal Geographical Society in August 2013 called ‘New Frontiers of connecting communities in the creative economy’ (we blogged about this at the time).

The subtitle of the book is ‘rethinking place, policy and practice’ and is our attempt to think through the way that space and place can have a major impact on the way that the creative economy is experienced and how communities can become engaged in creative practice.  As an edited collection it has contributors from a number of different fields, including professional practitioners from Birmingham City Council.  It also contains a piece by Cultural Intermediation’s very own Dave O’Brien looking at practices of participant-led evaluation within the Some Cities photography project, which was co-funded by CI as part of our pilot of community-led commissioning.

The full contents list and contributors is below.  It’s quite an expensive book to buy. but you can get in touch with the individual authors directly to see if they’ll supply you with a pre-publication version of their chapter.

Warren S & Jones P eds. (2015) Creative economies, creative communities: rethinking place, policy & practice.  Ashgate, Farnham

1. Introduction. Saskia Warren and Phil Jones

Section one: Creative Practice, Creating Communities

2. Producing people: the socio-materialities of African beadwork. Shari Daya

3. People, place and fish: Exploring the cultural ecosystem services of inshore fishing through photography. Tim G. Acott and Julie Urquhart

4. Evaluation, photography and intermediation: connecting Birmingham’s communities. Dave O’Brien

5. Creative place-making: where legal geography meets legal consciousness. Antonia Layard and Jane Milling

Section 2: Policy connections, creative practice

6. Bridging gaps and localising neighbourhood provision: reflections on cultural co-design and co-production. Ginnie Wollaston and Roxanna Collins

7. The everyday realities of digital provision and practice for rural creative economies. Liz Roberts and Leanne Townsend

8. Libraries and museums as breeding grounds of social capital and creativity: potential and challenges in the post-socialist context. Monika Murzyn-Kupisz and Jarek Działek

9. Cross Intermediation? Policy, creative industries and cultures across the EU. Paul Long and Steve Harding

10. Conclusion: the place of creative policy? Phil Jones and Saskia Warren