Target reached!
£48,204. Behind the scenes, £48,204 is the grand total still needed to seed Togethe...
Let's Bring Together Culture to Fitzroy Street!
Cambridge, Cambridgeshire, United Kingdom
Aim
Together Culture is making space to create, connect, and become more creative. Help to open our Citizen Studio on Fitzroy Street by October!
TOGETHER CULTURE @ FITZROY STREET / 25 SEPTEMBER 2023
Together Culture is making space to create, connect and to become more creative. Afterall, how will a more inclusive and ecological Cambridge emerge if we don't all top up our creative and collaborative skills and use them in EVERYTHING that we do? Together Culture Fitzroy will provide 25 studios for artists and social entrepreneurs, events and activities for all curious neighbours who want to build an everyday creative practice, and a Citizen Studio that teaches design thinking as we make a plan to develop a city where everyone can thrive.
Cambridge can become one of the most inclusive, ecological and vibrant creative economies in the world - but, we need affordable places to gather, opportunities to develop our talents, a framework to use our skills, and resources to turn vision into action. Together Culture Fitzroy is the next step in our journey to write a new chapter in the history of Cambridge. Curious? Join us!
EVERYTHING YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT TOGETHER CULTURE
HOW TOGETHER CULTURE CAMBRIDGE CAME TO BE
Together Culture was founded by a group of folks who live and work in Cambridge. We live in the shadow of The Grafton Centre and when it went up for sale we thought it was an opportunity to create space for everyone in Cambridge to come together and breathe new inclusive life into our high street.
Two and a half years later, everyone is still committed to Together Culture. Two of us, Heather Thomas and Ellie Breeze, quit our day jobs and as Founders are determined to create and share resources so that the journey for social enterpreneurs, artists, and other creatives who want to build a more abundant, caring, and inclusive society does not come with insurmountable roadblocks and inevitable sacrifice and struggle.
HOW TOGETHER WILL MAKE AN IMPACT?
By 2033, we see Together Culture as having a monumental social impact. We will gather a thriving community that will eventually have 1000s of people feeling empowered by each other to build and share a more equitable and ecological Cambridge. We will have a culture of active citizens making a contribution that matters, with the power to redistribute resources and shape a creative economy.*
AUTUMN 2022: A THEORY OF CHANGE EMERGES THROUGH CODESIGN
In 2022, we spent four months in a codesign project with more than 150 locals They all saw themselves as creatives, ranged in ages from 22 to 62, had different income levels, and spent their days doing different things. What held them together? They want to make a contribution to Cambridge, they want to do something more than they can do on their own, and they want to be freer to be themselves, to try new things, and break the moulds they're living in -- and they want to connect to people who want the same things because they don't meet them everyday.
What we did together, was to create a theory of change. In other words, we mapped out the future backwards to develop a framework or a pathway that is outcome oriented for HOW Together Culture could help to create a more inclusive and ecological creative economy. It has three core pillars:
- Individual Creative Practice / Our Community Pillar
- Collective Creative Practice / Our Culture Pillar
- Systems Change Incubator / Our Action Pillar
WINTER 2023: A COMMUNITY DESIGN EMERGES
Yes, Together Culture makes physical spaces and we're thrilled to be working with Ab Rogers Design to make exceptionally inspiring space designed for the art of care. We also build invisible infrastructure. Community is organic, meaning it emerges because it is organised. Different people have different roles and different services, products, and programmes are designed to help them build their own skills and deepen their service to the full community. Together Culture's community design is built to help people develop and maintain their own wellbeing as well as the community's wellbeing.
We worked with Intercultural Communication's Masters' Degree Candidates at ARU to test our thinking /
THE LIVING BOOK AND THE COMMUNITY DEVELOPMENT BOARD
Through the codesign, four core values emerged: Turning up (with curiosity and opennes), Collaborating, Experimenting, and Helping Others. Values on a piece of paper aren't helpful unless we live those behaviours. But, living those behaviours can be challenging if we don't have the life skills. And, even those of us who do have the life skills aren't always great at using them in every challenging situation that arises! That's why we wrote the Living Book. It's a toolkit for living our values and helps us all develop our collaborative and creative skills. The tools are peppered into every single event you'll attend at Together Culture. And it is a Living Book because we imagine as a community we'll write a new edition as we live the book, probably each and every year. Here's an example from the Collaborate Chapter in The Living Book:
WHAT WE'VE DONE SO FAR/ STORY OF US STUDIO / Spring and Summer 2023
In the summer of 2023, 71 Founding Members of Together Culture came together to explore the intersection of failure, creativity, and wellbeing. We shared secrets, we forged bonds, we built a cabinet of curiosities and in doing so discovered that although we had a multitude of different lived experiences and identities, we shared a common passion for living creatively.
Our Story of Us Studio was a vibrant space at St Paul's Church on Hills Road. Members came in and sat with conversation leaders and visual artists and shared stories of their favourite mistakes. We didn't wake up one day and think, hey let's talk about failure. It emerged through co-design and golly, yes! People want to talk about failure. The mistakes that were shared became portraits that were painted on repurposed mannequins. Their stories became an oral history treasure trove from which we gathered 'data' , the threads of a common story that is the Together Culture manifesto, essentially the space we will hold to let people be free to be themselves because we are living our living book values.
And altogether, it became a Cabinet of Curiosities that was installed at The Fitzwilliam Museum from 15 - 21 August with the help of Makespace.
WHAT WILL HAPPEN AT TOGETHER CULTURE AT FITZROY STREET?
Are you a curious citizen, interested in developing your creative practice? For you , it will be a place for you to drop in regularly to enjoy the space, hot desk in the living room, watch a film, drop into a pop up event. You'll love the Saturday Lounge when tunes will play, there will always be pop up events by members, and an Unlocking Your Creativity Treatment Room where you can book reiki treaments, coaching sessions, and movement medicine with wellbeing entrepreneurs. We’ll be installing our first Citizen Studio, which we describe as a Bake Off technical challenge meets an escape room, a cool game in which we develop ideas for how to create a more inclusive and ecological creative economy in Cambridge - and where people develop design thinking skills along the way. We’ll be running mini festivals for Halloween and a Festival of Lights: expect histories and folklore of the Fens, witchcraft in cambridge, workshops on how to tell ghost stories, screenings, readings by local novelists, and more...
Are you a working artist or social entrepreneur looking for studio space?
We’ll also be able to offer individual studio and creative workspace for artists and social entrepreneurs for £65 per month. Meaning, it's yours - it's not a hot desk. We’ll launch our first residency in which we’ll develop the structure for our Systems Change incubator - which we’ll run in 2024, with the aim of transitioning the priorities that emerge from Citizen’s Studio into new social enterprises, co-created and funded by our membership.
Are you interested in becoming a social entrepreneur in the creative industries?
We'll be working with Inspire to Ignite on a three month programme for people aged 16 to 24 who are interested in working in the creative industries for social good. Details on how to register coming soon! Programme starts in January.
Together Culture Community Board
The Together Culture Community Board will also be working to develop our model for participatory democracy and designing our first incubator to put the ideas from our Citizens Studio into action. There will be opportunities to co-create throughout the six months.
THE NEED TO MAKE THIS A REALITY
Along the way, we hope to grow from 70 to 350 members. Phew! We’ve got plans, to make them reality, we need to raise £50,000. Behind the scenes were working on sponsorship, grant, and angel investment. To get us across the finish line, we’re also planning to run a crowdfunder with a target of £10,000.
WHAT HAPPENS AFTER FITZROY STREET? IDEAS BECOME ACTION!
We're working to secure a permanent space. We can't make an announcement just yet, but we believe that we will be able to do so by the end of the year.
Importantly, after all this gathering of members and the work we're doing in the Citizen's Studio - the next step is putting the ideas that emerge into action! By autumn 2024, we hope to be in the position to start our first incubator so that our community is co-creating, and investing in new social enterprises and people who wouldn't otherwise be able to become social entrepreneurs. In this way, we're creating opportunity, redistributing wealth, and building opportunities to thrive for us all!
GET INVOLVED IN THE CROWDFUNDER AND LEARN MORE ABOUT TOGETHER CULTURE, EVENTS ON THE HORIZON:
This project successfully funded on 20th September 2023