Jerome Turner

Creative Citizens Fair, Saturday June 27th, 2015. At Impact Hub, Birmingham, UK. Funded under the AHRC Connected Communities Festival programme.

Community studies, even when they employ co-creation methods, are not always effective at communicating their work to non-academic audiences. The Connected Communities Festival showcase opportunity allows the Media, Community and the Creative Citizen project to build on engagement work by co-producing a one-day event with relevant community-facing partner organisations. Speakers and attendees were invited to discuss their activities at a peer-to-peer level – in short, the ‘creative citizens’ that have been the subject of the project's work – and participate in ‘family friendly’ activities to explore themes inherent in citizenship practices. 

1. Presentations and discussion
The main focus of the day was pre-programmed talks running from 11am-4pm. This allowed for a maximum of eight speakers at 20 minutes each, followed by 10 minutes for questions. A call for event speakers was aimed primarily at Birmingham organisations or community projects, in recognition of current discourses of the ‘Greater Birmingham’ region, and its active creative industries and citizens. The talks were 1. selected by the partnership team from call ‘applications’, and 2. invited from currently known organisations. The focus was on learning and sharing, so talks were encouraged that engaged with best practice advice. The real value came from a peer-to-peer approach, rather than passing through a prism of academia, off-putting for some.

2. Workshops and activities
Activities and workshops were run in a more social open Fair space at the same venue, with attendees taking part on a ‘drop in’ basis. The focus was on encouraging people to collectively explore everyday understandings of themes such as ‘place’, ‘community’ and ‘giving’. The three workshops were: a finger knitting workshop exploring themes of community; breadmaking workshop; urban planning workshop. Permanent whiteboards installed during the day invited attendees to share their answers to the question ‘What does being a creative citizen mean to you?’ and also create a crowdsourced network diagram of people and their possible connections for future collaboration. The focus of these activities was to provide innovative methods for engaging with and rethinking issues inherent in creative citizenship practices, and to create new collaborative relationships where possible.

3. Stands and stalls
The open space offered  organisations (including our partners) opportunity to present stands or single tables, where attendees could find out more about their work throughout the event.
4. Exhibition: Creative Citizens photographic portraits and materials

The event also capitalised on project materials created thus far, such as a series of photographic portraits of ‘creative citizens’ displayed at the 2014 Cardiff showcase. Given these subjects were from across the UK, this situates the Birmingham event within a broader context of citizenship activities and the research project itself. We also made printed copies of our 40-page Findings document available to attendees.

Day's running order

Creative Citizens @CrtvCitizens ​creativecitizens.co.uk
Hashtag for the event #CCFair

Talks in the Town Hall (Upstairs​)
11.00 Digbeth is Good @digbeth ​digbeth.org
11.30 The Hub at Ashmore Park @ashmoreparkhub ​www.the-hub.info
12.00 Bread2Share @bread2share ​bread2share.fraggle.co
12.30 ​LUNCH
13.00 Little Hippo @littlehipposhop  www.littlehippopresents.com
13.30 Bearwood Promoters @BearwoodShuffle ​www.bearwoodshuffle.org
14.00 The Real Junk Food Project @TRJFPBrum ​www.therealjunkfoodproject.org 14.30 ​BREAK
15.00 Craftivism @Bham_Craftivist ​www.janethakoordin.com/

Workshops in The Workshop (Downstairs)
Crafty Muthas - Finger Knitting - Throughout the day @craftymuthas ​www.craftymuthasbearwood.com/
Bread2Share - Dough Making - Between 2pm and 4pm @bread2share ​bread2share.fraggle.co
Made - Placemaking/Housing Design Challenge - Throughout the day @MADEplaces ​www.made.org.uk

Stalls in The Workshop (Downstairs)
Beatfreeks @beatfreeks ​www.beatfreeks.com
Envision @envisionuk ​www.envision.org.uk
Time Union Coventry @TimeUnionCoventry ​timetodigestcoventry.wordpress.com/time-union All of Birmingham is a Stage (DanceXchange) @dancexchange ​www.dancexchange.org.uk The Real Junk Food Project @TRJFPBrum ​www.therealjunkfoodproject.org
Reel Eyes Films @reeleyze ​www.reeleyesfilms.co.uk
Bearwood Shuffle @BearwoodShuffle ​www.bearwoodshuffle.org
Moseley Exchange @MoseleyExchange ​www.moseleyexchange.com

The event was free, with capacity for 100. 100 free tickets were 'sold' on Eventbrite, with around 85 attending on the day, plus organisers / staff. Feedback was overwhelmingly positive, with evidence from feedback forms that theday informed their own practices and in some cases set up new, concrete projects or connections.

Feedback on Twitter: https://storify.com/jezturner/creative-citizens-fair-2015-feedback

Work of the Creative Citizens project, which I worked on, has been recognised in Cardiff University's Centre for Community Journalism annual review, where they, in turn, "work with communities in Wales and beyond to support the development
of news services created by local people, for local people."

In discussing research, they said they: "learnt from and publicised Creative Citizens research carried out at Cardiff  University and Birmingham City University into the value of hyperlocal news;" (Annual review, p11)