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Tag: 2021

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News

Feedback from the Stove’s Annual Gathering

Missed out on our AGM last month? We’ve got you covered with recordings of the two presentations shared during The Stove’s Annual Gathering. First up, a review of the past 12 months from Matt Baker (Orchestrator) and Katharine Wheeler (Partnerships and Development), featuring (approximate!) closed captions:

The second presentation looks forward to the year ahead, from Martin O’Neill (Artistic Director).

Also as part of our AGM we hosted a series of short members conversations reflecting on some of the key findings from our membership survey carried out last year. We wanted to take the opportunity to share some of the ideas that came out of these five really interesting sessions.

  • a creative exploration of night time culture
  • a debating club
  • a debating club for Disabled Access
  • Digital recording of live events at The Stove to allow more inclusion for audiences who can’t attend in person
  • More making spaces – we need to move from attics to aircraft hangers to realise our potential
  • Signposting good practice nationally and internationally in social/community arts
  • Digital recording of live events at The Stove to allow more inclusion for audiences who can’t attend in person
  • Use technology to reach across distance
  • Make a statue of Ailsa in Fountain Square
  • Stove learning: Don’t just tell people stuff, support them with the means to do it themselves
  • Access to IT skills development and recording of activities
  • See our towns and villages in D+G as mini-cultural hubs Its good for Stove to be more regional, but don’t forget about Dumfries, there is still a lot of work to be done doon hame
  • Analysis of the population in comparison to our current engagement reach – elderly inclusion 
  • Intergenerational working  particularly within the medium of movement
  • ‘Access to Choice’ – diversity in how to access events and activity
  • bringing in Community Learning and Development expertise available locally into the Stove team
  • grow ‘night-time culture’ in the town centre
  • bring some of the ‘positives’ discovered during the past year into future activity 

There were loads of brilliant conversations between the 75 attendees, and we were sorry to not have longer to open up the space to hear from friends, members and Stove supporters after such a long period away from the Stove building, but hope that we can continue these soon!

You might notice that our website has had a bit of an upgrade to reflect our programme this year, so to explore more of our current and upcoming projects visit: home page, and Soapbox.

Categories
News

Region Chosen for National Culture Programme

We are delighted to announce that The Stove Network have won a place for Dumfries and Galloway in a major Scottish initiative for culture and creativity to play a key role in the nation’s long-term recovery from the pandemic. The Culture Collective programme will see £6M invested by Scottish Government in 26 regional projects around the country, developed in partnership with Creative Scotland. The Dumfries & Galloway project ‘What We Do Now’ was granted the maximum award of £300,000. 

The principle of Culture Collective is to pay creative freelancers, who have seen livelihoods decimated by the pandemic, to work in community settings and support local groups who have also been badly impacted by Covid-19. The Stove Network worked together with agencies such as Dumfries & Galloway Council, South of Scotland Enterprise, Skills Development Scotland, Third Sector D&G and local arts organisations to bring together a proposal for Dumfries and Galloway that will see creative practitioners employed to work for up to a year in Sanquhar, Dalbeattie, Langholm, Stranraer and Northwest Dumfries. In Sanquhar, our lead organisation is A’ the Airts, in Langholm OutPost Arts, in NW Dumfries LIFT D&G, in Dalbeattie Birchvale Theatre* and in Stranraer, Stranraer Millennium Centre.

This is wonderful news and a very powerful recognition of the way that Dumfries and Galloway considers culture and creativity as something that is integrated into the heart of the way we do things in communities, in the economy and in the environment in our region. Culture is not something for an elite; it is something that belongs to all of us and something that we all make together. Culture Collective is part of our country’s commitment to ‘build back better’ – it uses years of dedicated work at grassroots level as the foundation for a major pilot project to devolve decision-making and funding to local level and create the conditions for partnership working across sectors to ensure the legacy of this approach.

In the coming weeks, we will coordinate development work in the five D&G communities towards creating detailed briefs for creatives to work within. It is anticipated that adverts for people to work on the project will be published in mid-March. The Stove’s project for Culture Collective is called ‘What We Do Now’ and builds on the group’s ‘Embers: Creative Placemaking for the South of Scotland’ report which was published in April 2020. Embers highlights the central role that culture and creativity are playing in community regeneration projects around the region and presents a case for investing in a networked and integrated approach to placemaking in Dumfries and Galloway, employing creativity as a key tool in community planning.

‘What We Do Now’ is all about imagining today, the world we wish to exist in and making the steps towards creating that world now. A world shaped by the gifts and ideas of the communities we belong to and serve. It explores and brings to the surface, the voices previously unheard in our region so that we can empower ideas and communities, through creativity, to celebrate and cherish the places that we live.

All of the communities involved in the ‘What We Do Now’ project were partners in Embers. All have identified sections of their own community where COVID has accentuated existing disadvantage and exclusion and have some experience of working culturally. Each community will be supported to commission freelance creative practitioners who will co-create original projects with people in the targeted sections of that community.

Yvonne Barber, Project Manager for A’ the Airts in Sanquhar commented: ‘A’ the Airts is excited to be participating in this exciting collaborative project. Our community in Upper Nithsdale will benefit immensely from A’ the Airts having further artistic capacity to work with local communities. Partnership and sharing good practice can only be positive, strengthening and building peoples’ skills, and more importantly their well-being.’

For more information on Culture Collective, click here.

*Due to their current organisational and programming needs Birchvale will no longer be taking part in the What We Do Now project in this instance. Castle Douglas Development Forum will however be joining us as a place-lead in the Stewartry.

Categories
News Opportunities

Opportunity for Freelance Artists/Creative Practitioners in Dumfries and Galloway

The Stove has been asked by the Wheatley Group to help them find creatives in D+G to put themselves forward for grants of up to £5,000 to develop and deliver new projects with children and young people in the region. Wheatley is a national organisation for social housing in Scotland and they are working in partnership with Creative Scotland on this project.

In the first instance the project is looking for expressions of interest from creatives with an idea for a project that can help improve the skills, confidence and wellbeing of young people. Projects are to be delivered within a year (though do not need to last a whole year) and you do not need to specify a community you would work with as Wheatley will help connect artists to communities locally.

If you are interested, there is more information available here including dates for online information sessions.

Please email [email protected] to receive an application pack. Deadline 5th March

Categories
News

The Stove Presents: Conversations at Home

The Stove continues to advocate for the power of creative community-led work in supporting and sustainably developing our places. We are doing this by continuing conversations at home, through activity with Homegrown and Atlas Pandemica, and also as part of local, national and international networks that provide opportunities for shared learning and inform and advocate for this Creative Placemaking work.

The Stove’s Embers report defined this placemaking practice as:


“a collaborative practice that uses creative activity to connect and come together with other individuals, groups and organisations and respond to local needs with innovative solutions that focus on social wellbeing and inclusion in our communities.” 

Embers

We continue to focus on opportunities for collaboration, shared-resource, cross-sector working and locally led innovation. This month our team will be joining key partners at two major public events (see below for details) to talk about how the Creative Placemaking practice of The Stove has led to significant change in the regeneration and development of Dumfries’ High Street, helping to grow social enterprises and community initiatives for our local communities. A most notable example of this Creative Placemaking work is Midsteeple Quarter (MSQ), now a Community Benefit Society in its own right, MSQ is a community-led regeneration project for the centre of Dumfries and an exemplar of a co-creation, collaborative community and sector led approach to economic development for its place. 

Matt Baker, founding member and Stove Orchestrator, will be joining Community Land Scotland and Carnegie Trust UK for ‘Community Ownership – Shaping the Future of Our Towns’. Katharine Wheeler, Stove Partnerships and Project Development lead, will be joining the Newcastle University Engagement Team for Wor Culture: Re-thinking the High Street and the role for Arts and Culture.


Please join us:
Community Ownership – Shaping the Future of Our Towns – Tuesday 26th January 2-3.30pm
https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/community-ownership-shaping-the-future-of-our-towns-registration-132730463389

Wor Culture: Re-thinking the High Street – What Role for Arts and Culture? – Wednesday 27th January 12.30-2.00pm https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/wor-culture-re-thinking-the-high-street-what-role-for-arts-and-culture-registration-135664737883

Categories
Musings News

2021: The Stove at 10 Years

‘For me, the question of democracy also opens up the question of what does it mean to be truly human. And it seems to me that we need to recognize that to develop the best humanity, the best spirit, the best community, there needs to be discipline, practices of exploring. How do you do that? How do we work together? How do we talk together in ways that will open up our best capacities and our best gifts?’

Vincent Harding

Looking back, looking forward

Our first foot into the New Year might seem like little has changed. With a new spike rolling in with the first snowfall of January, a third lockdown begins. And as we huddle further into our little worlds the news cycle spins and bounces off the walls with the discovery of a vaccine. And for now, we carry on.

2021 marks ten years of the Stove’s work. And we’re immensely proud of what’s been achieved in that time; from festivals and events to community buy-outs and river races. Together with our community, we’ve shaped a new vision not only for the arts but also for the vital role that communities and creativity play in the shaping of our town.

This year, we’re focused on sharing and learning together again so that we can build and support new and ambitious ideas from the voices hitherto unheard across the region.

As of December, the Stove has been focused on building a programme of new projects that will allow us to delve deeper into connecting communities, ideas and creativity together. We want to build new connections, routes and opportunities for learning across our membership and wider region.

This year we want to discover new voices, train and support new ideas as well as deepen our relationship to the places beyond the town center.

We will do this by:

  • Creating new spaces for people to learn, share and take part in conversations to map the future of our region.
  • Continuing to explore and promote bold and innovative projects that connect people in a time of social isolation.
  • Finding the new stories and storytellers to help us navigate a world spinning further out of reach.
  • Focusing on localism and power by providing the tools necessary for communities to realise and shape their identities and futures.

Our programme will stretch across sharing skills in digital communication to help communities and artists reach further and more meaningfully to people, regional projects to support bold ideas concerned with community ownership and place-making and a responsive series of events and conversations open to all.

We are committed to exploring, developing and sharing how we work with other places and people and to continue the conversation online through our new podcast channel and other outlets.

Throughout January the Stove will be planning and organizing for the year ahead, so we encourage you to keep an eye on our website and social media for announcements, job opportunities and activity.

We’d like to once again thank our membership and community who have helped to shape our ideas for the year ahead by taking part in our projects, events, consultations and conversations throughout 2020.

And to celebrate ten years of the Stove we’ll be sharing the stories of those who have come through our doors, sharing their favourite memories as well as finding out what lies next for us over the next 10 years.

Whilst the road ahead looks rough, we’re hopeful our work will cement a new vision of community and creativity that seeks to support a fairer society for all. We can’t wait to see what comes of it.

Categories
Opportunities

OPPORTUNITY: Artist/Maker Commission – Symbol of Community Support

Midsteeple Quarter is a community-led project to breathe new life into the centre of Dumfries. The Stove Network is working in partnership with Midsteeple Quarter  to commission an artist/maker to create an innovative and changing artwork that demonstrates the support of local groups, businesses and individuals for the Midsteeple Quarter project. The artwork will be sited in the window of ‘The Smithy’ – one of the community owned shops on Dumfries High Street. As the project develops the artwork must adapt to incorporate the names of sponsors as they get involved.

In the first instance, the artwork will form part of a Crowdfunder campaign that will raise money to purchase more buildings for the community; but, the intention is for the artwork to have a life beyond this first campaign and become an enduring symbol of community support for Midsteeple Quarter.

The commission is open to artists and makers working in any medium. The developing nature of the work must be practical and achievable without additional expertise or expense. The total budget for the commission is £1000 inclusive of all fees, materials, expenses and VAT.

To apply please submit the following:

·      A sketch design of your idea

·      Images of up to three relevant examples of your recent work

This is a short turnaround project; applications must be received by 5pm Friday 15th January. The Commission will be awarded on Monday 18th January and the artwork will be in place in by 5th February.

If you would like to discuss the opportunity please contact Scott Mackay on [email protected]

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