This year the Stove took part in the Guid Nychburris Day Parade, an annual event in the Dumfries calendar that sees community groups and clubs in a variety of fancy dress taking to the streets in the evening parade that is the culmination of the days festivities.
In honour of the upcoming Nithraid festival, our Salty Coo returned early from her pastures to take pride of place on a small Mirror Dinghy – definitely the blue-est cow we’ve ever encountered!
Our resident seagull attracted the most attention on the parade route
Ahead of the Parade, we opened out the invitation to smaller groups and organisations to take part in banner making workshops in the Oven and the Stove. The Parade is a great opportunity to share projects and community groups with an audience of thousands along the route, but it can be a bit daunting to take on a large float amongst a small group of volunteers.
On the day, we were joined by the blueprint100 team and some fantastic volunteers – familiar and new faces! and the DGMA multicultural association, who all produced a beautiful collection of banners in record time!
One of the DGMA’s brightly coloured banners
And we even won a prize! Placed third in our category, thanks to the efforts of our banner making team and all who attended the workshops.
The blueprint100 team will be hosting a series of banner making workshops in July and August in the run up to this years Nithraid festival on Saturday, 31st of August – and everyone is invited! Find out about upcoming workshops, or contact Jordan directly to host a workshop with your community group or organisation. For details, visit the blueprint100 Facebook page here or contact [email protected].
How do we connect up the culturally-led work that is happening in communities across D & G and build our region into a powerhouse of enterprise and opportunity?
There is growing recognition that something special is happening in D+G – our creative sector is working at the heart of rural communities and helping to inspire, facilitate and connect other initiatives (eg taking over underused buildings) that are making a real difference for places and the people that live there. The Stove Network has been both a resource and catalyst for the region through its work in Dumfries town centre. It has formed in-depth working partnerships with the local authority and other groups/agencies, building a portfolio of experience in bringing together community, agency and business interests to develop its work in place-making and culturally-led regeneration.
The Stove has received national and international recognition for their pioneering work in this field and with the advent of the new South of Scotland Enterprise Agency (SoSEP) an opportunity has been identified to develop a plan to strengthen the connection between existing projects and seed new ones for the benefit of the region as a whole.SoSEP has granted The Stove funding for a focused piece of work, based on their Enterprising Communities proposal, to look at the opportunity for better shared learning, the support needed for this activity in place-making and culturally-led regeneration and pathways to opportunities in Creative Industries.
How can we work together to strengthen these for our region? What support does this work need to flourish and grow localised decisions for the places we live?
For the next 6 months The Stove will be carrying out a feasibility study for Enterprising Communities, under their project – Embers – igniting culturally-led regeneration across Dumfries and Galloway – to explore and define a joined-up vision for work in place-making and culturally-led regeneration and enterprise in Dumfries and Galloway. This piece of work will not focus on the model to deliver this work but on how we can strengthen the pathways between the work we ALL currently do. We will look at what we need to support this, to encourage new work and sustainable development in this area.
How do we build on existing networks in the communities and cultural/creative sectors – overlaying and combining them to create a powerfully integrated regional field of shared resource, capacity, knowledge, skills and opportunity?
Embers will be led by Katharine Wheeler for The Stove with support from across our networks, agencies and partners. Firstly, Katharine will look at areas of best practice in place-making across the region and secondly, produce a feasibility document as a regional development model for place-making and culturally-led regeneration across Dumfries and Galloway defining out how best to take this forward.
We are working closely with Carnegie Trust who will be providing case studies and help in identifying significant indicators of this work throughout the project.
The feasibility study – Embers – will explore a regional development model in relation to the main aims of how the new South of Scotland’s Enterprising Partnership (SoSEP) can support place-making, creative industries and culturally-led regeneration across Dumfries and Galloway.
This will feed into SoSEP’s current enquires:
What forms of support are needed to enable the communities in the South of Scotland to become more resilient and to help communities grow?
Advise within that what type of support SOSEP could provide, and how, to enable community organisations to become more successful.
What would success look like – for communities and for SoSEP?
We have already been in communication with some of our partners and other organisations and groups across the region about this piece of work and will be looking to connect with others. If you are wanting to find out more about this, or get a copy of our initial Enterprising Communities proposal please email [email protected] directly.
Our Orchestrator, Matt Baker is one of the original founders of The Stove Network and offers some personal reflections about how The Stove started and how it works today.
So just Who or What is The Stove?
‘The Stove’ has existed for 7 years now. Its origins have perhaps been forgotten, and questions and assumptions naturally arise about what The Stove is now, how it functions, for whom and why?
Let me start by stating that I am fiercely proud of The Stove, and believe passionately in its potential to help people shape their own dreams and careers. I also hope that The Stove is a creative force that has become a vital part of supporting local people to re-invent Dumfries as a vibrant and prosperous place, a Dumfries fit for our times.
The Stove started as a conversation in 2011, between 10 artists and creative people working in the area. We all shared a belief that placing a community project with a creative ethos at the heart of Dumfries town centre would have a positive impact on the future of the town and contribute new opportunities for local people, when precious few existed. That was it really – a commitment to the generous way that creative people work together and how that could infuse the life of the town.
There were moments of doubt and significant obstacles to overcome on the journey: ‘how would we run a space?’, ‘where would the money come from?’, ‘how would we organise ourselves and make decisions?’… we have tackled every question and situation in the same spirit – by talking together and applying our founding values:
To work through collaboration (not in isolation)
To innovate (not be risk-averse)
To put people first and consider the emotional landscape of all decision-making
These values bring creative practice into all of the structures and processes that we encounter, developing a working methodology that keeps The Stove open, transparent and flexible. People are genuinely able to shape The Stove in ways that work for them and for the town.
Our values led us to the two foundations of how The Stove works:
The Stove is a membership organisation, membership is free and unrestricted*. Currently we have just over 500 members who, every year, elect a Board of Directors who are responsible for running The Stove.
The Board employ a very small team of core employees who take care of the day to day management of The Stove. The core team supports a much larger group of freelancers – this is a flexible and changing group of people who work on one or more project with The Stove, some of these roles are longer term and some can be just a matter of weeks connected to a particular festival or workshop.
Our doors are always open for members. They can (and do) get in touch at any time with their questions, ideas and projects. Literally anyone can work with the Stove, either in a paid capacity, as a volunteer, for the experience or just the good craic of being involved in something worthwhile. We are proud that in 2017-18 we were able to offer £212,000 in contracts and opportunities for the local creative people and small businesses at all stages of their development. Since 2011, we’ve commissioned £665,775 in total. This is all money that the vision and vibrancy of The Stove has managed to attract to the area. For every £1 of local council support we receive for local projects, we attract an additional £8.00 of income from other sources (check our ‘Key Facts’ for more info about Stove income sources and history)
It has been an extraordinary journey since that original conversation around a table at the Coach and Horses in 2011…but the Stove’s success continues to be drawn from those original founding principles of: people first, collective working, openness and, of course, creativity. Why not see for yourself and come in for a chat – it might just be a conversation that changes your life!
*you don’t have to be an ‘artist’, just interested in our mission to be part of shaping the future of our region. Check it out here
I’ve had cause to think about public money of late – what do people mean by the term? Why is it such a loaded term? Are attitudes different in different societies? Has the nature of public money changed for us over the years? What should it be for now?
I suppose things started with chiefs and monarchs demanding taxes from the people within their tribes or lands to pay for organising their safety and keeping the peace. Then when we moved to a democratic way of organising our society we kept the taxation idea but attempted to make a system whereby the money gathered was a form of common-wealth that was directed to making the best for everybody. In Britain this resulted in incredible, visionary things like the National Health Service and free education for all. In other societies (e.g. Scandinavian countries) there still seems to be a strong sense that everyone contributes and everyone expects to benefit from the resources, services and opportunities provided by the common-wealth of the community. This is not public money viewed as the bare minimum to provide a safety net for those too poor or sick to look after themselves or base-level provision of things we have a ‘right’ to expect like cleaning the streets…rather it is a conscious and deliberate system for giving the best standard of living and opportunities to the most people within a society…and how that builds a place long-term, not just patch the streets.
This is what I have been pondering – Why do we often seem to have such a different attitude in our society? Why are we not proud and passionately engaged in the process of deciding on the best way to invest our common-wealth to give the maximum benefit to everyone? To debate answers to these questions would be to analyse hundreds of years of politics, culture and history. I can’t pretend to be capable of doing that – and, ultimately I am not all that interested in the answers.
What I am passionate about is the situation that we find ourselves in just now, and what we, as a modern society, as a community of people, are going to do in facing up to our situation. We have created a massive and shameful gap between people with nothing and people with everything – and the gap is growing larger by the day. The terrible logic of this is that people seem to feel that they must hold tightly to the relatively little they have, a perverse culture of fear … ‘devil take the hindmost’… ‘I’m alright Jack’’. This fear actually supports the widening gap … whilst we are protecting our crumbs others are gleefully stashing away full cakes. But what if instead of fearing losing more – we were to build strength rather than merely try to stem a decline that we have been convinced is inevitable?
It seems to me that this is the root of current attitudes to ‘public money’ some people are so deeply wedded to this culture of acceptance of doom that they see any use of public money as either a ‘waste’ or ‘too little too late’ or ‘naïve’ or ‘corrupt’… may be such people have lost hope of improving their situation (or that of their neighbours) or they have a vested interest in the current status quo and seek to undermine any attempt to change it.
The truth is that Public Money (our common-wealth) is, along with our passion, spirit and creativity the most powerful tool we have for levelling the playing field of opportunity in our society. If we can create the opportunities for more people to achieve their potential everyone will be raised up together. Feeling pleased at seeing someone struggle is simply a mirror of your own struggle – by celebrating the growth of others we all grow together.
This is why I (and The Stove) am proud and humbled to be trusted with sums of public money. I feel the responsibility to extract every ounce of usefulness and benefit for my community. I see public money as an investment in our collective passion, spirit and creativity and a means of reaching out a supportive and compassionate hand. Public money can be smart and inventive, but above all it needs to be a force for equality, because only understanding ourselves as a community with the power to grow together will we have any chance of bridging the gap that threatens to destroy us all.
Our Bounce Back project, led by Martin O’Neill has been popping up in and around North West Dumfries over the past few months, including film screenings and the launch of the Ignition Fund, as well as supporting other events in the Lochside and Lincluden areas.
A month ago, Bounce Back began a series of Upcycling workshops, sharing skills and ideas to repair and reimagine unwanted clothes into something new.
Workshops run every second Thursday, with sessions still to come on the 10th and 24th of August at the Lochside Family Centre.
A ‘punk orchestra’ will come to Dumfries over April and May to collaborate, compose and improvise with young musicians during five Saturday workshops, as well as offering an opportunity to perform at the Theatre Royal. The Big Jam workshops, presented in collaboration with Dumfries Music Conference, and supported by The Stove Network and D&G Arts Festival, will provide musicians with the opportunity to work with the Tinderbox Orchestra. The Orchestra, which features a fusion of instruments, styles and people, write and perform original compositions. The group will host a series of free workshops in Dumfries town centre that are suitable for musicians aged 12 and over. Founded in 2010 as a small community youth orchestra with a difference, Tinderbox has grown to become a ground-breaking youth arts organisation, charity and social enterprise. Tinderbox aims to ignite a spark in young people; one which fills them with confidence, imagination and a sense of possibility, and which enables people to achieve things they never thought possible. Tinderbox Orchestra will collaborate with Dumfries Music Conference to undertake a five-week project in Dumfries during April and May, which will culminate with the group’s performance at the town’s Theatre Royal on 27th May. During these five-weeks, free workshops will be held for five consecutive Saturdays, starting on 22nd April at Lovers Lane Studios from 12-4pm. Musicians will have the opportunity to play with a real-life orchestra and learn the craft of scoring an orchestral composition to go along with their own performances and song-writing endeavours.
Participants are invited to attend all or some of the sessions and to bring along their instrument, so that they can play with the group. The sessions will focus on a different piece each week, which will interweave around writing a group composition. Experiment with ideas, collaborate with other musicians and become part of the country’s loudest, most innovative orchestra.
For more information, visit DMC on Facebook @DumfriesMusicConference
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