Messages Across Leeds Leeds College of Art’s community department was awarded funding from the Skills Funding Agency to run a new engagement project in 2011, to encourage people living in the Inner Leeds communities to participate in something different and to explore new ways of delivering a community learning programme. To support the development of an innovation project, we collaborated with the BA Visual Communication course, a course for students with a wealth of eclectic skills and knowledge, interested in the benefits of volunteering and working with the local community. The students designed the concept of a ‘pop-up’ travelling workshop that could be transported across Leeds on a bus to work with difficult to reach groups and people experiencing isolation, especially during winter, bringing something new to their doorstep and support them to feel part of Leeds and their community. After making links with community organisations, practitioners and students spent over two months visiting groups and venues, including shopping centres, market, mobile library buses, libraries and community organisations, totaling in over 35 workshops lasting from one hour to all day. People were invited to draw, speak, stamp or write a message on one of six postcards, each with a different prompt. Each postcard was then sent for one of six exciting exhibitions that would showcase and share their messages with the wider population of Leeds. We discovered that working in this way was far more effective at engaging with groups and individuals that find it difficult to join a college course and commit to something more substantial. The format of a small-scale mobile workshop has been invaluable to the department; it has seen volunteer numbers rise by over 200% enabled us to work with over twenty community groups we have not worked with before. As a result, we have already set up five new mobile taster workshops to follow the project, helping shape the future of the community department to be more responsive to individual community groups in Leeds. The support of the student volunteers with concept design, organisation, publicity, press, social networking, exhibition curation and event management has been invaluable and I would like to give a big thank you to everyone that has helped to make this project be a success.
Marianne Springham Project Manager Messages Across Leeds