Clean Air Project

Odd Arts worked with the community campaign ‘Let’s Talk Clean Air Whalley Range’ (TCAWR, @talkcleanairWR) to develop an education film about air pollution and the barriers to cleaning-up air. This involved workshops with multiple Whalley Range community groups, including parents at a local primary school, school students at a local secondary, a mental health support group at a local GP surgery, a local Church group, a group at the Muslim Heritage Centre and business owners at the Carlton Club. Using Theatre of the Oppressed techniques to elicit reflections on what prevents people in Whalley Range from taking action to clean up the local air quality. Our Associate Writer, Curtis, brought together this huge range of material to script and, with the help of Split the Atom productions, directed a short film about the obstacles to local residents in taking decisive action on air pollution. This film, which we made with community actors and the school group from a previous workshop, was first screened at a showcase with over 50 attendees, including local MP Afzal Khan, and it is now part of a bespoke workshop delivered by the campaign, LTCAWR, to a whole range of community groups across Whalley Range and beyond. Alongside this, Odd Arts delivered training on key facilitation skills, including our core practices of restorative approaches and nonviolent communication.

In Our Words partnered with Walk the Plank to take part in the Manchester Day Parade based on the theme ‘energy of the future’. The majority of participants in this project had additional needs, ranging from Downs Syndrome to being autistic, and yet we saw them all participate fully and joyfully in the parade, with several of them even removing their sound muffling headphones, indicating a comfort level in the environment that went well beyond what we had anticipated.