Making friends in communities across Salford

Hello and welcome to the Salford section of our website where we talk about who we have been making connections with across the City – and where – through various projects.

In many ways, all our work is embedded in local communities, but the specific focus on these pages is to capture grassroots projects that we are helping to make happen with the people who live in our Salford neighbourhoods.

Across a wide range of communities, we are developing work with:

• East Salford, with Cobden Works as a creative hub at the heart of this community, and community at the centre of our hyperlocal approach. This includes links with Salford University, East Salford Neighbourhood team, local organisations and residents.
  Kindly supported by East Salford Community Committee.
• Little Hulton, via our partnership with Little Hulton Big Local and Salford Community Leisure
• Irlam and Cadishead, via ongoing work with I&C Festival.

Additionally, our Cobden Works outdoor arts creative hub is located in an area dominated by rubbish, with waste management companies, skip lorries and the Salford tip at the end of the road. Fly tipping blights our local landscape and the detritus of modern urban life is strewn across our street.

So, we want to make a positive impact on our shared environment and weave the idea of sustainable improvements into the fabric of our projects – from using recycled materials to commissioning artists who work with the idea of reduce, reuse, and recycle.

At the heart of this work is a simple belief in the power of culture to help people of all ages, and from different cultural viewpoints, come together through events and projects that they shape and develop. Each project is as unique as the next, in size, content, format and location.  But the aims of each one of them are all essentially all the same – to help everyone have access to events that reflect who they are and the pride they have in their community.

Creatively our work in Salford involves:

• Being outdoors and being an outsider, stepping out of the normal and every day with a place based approach that relooks at public space and the public realm … temporary transformation that helps to bring about change and change perceptions
• Playing with fire, taking risks … we use our workshops to build things for ourselves and our partners, as well as make things happen.
• Working with water, using an area of our expertise to celebrate the City’s waterways – from the hidden and forgotten (such as the Irwell) as well as the regenerated and modern (as seen at Salford Quays).

Volunteering and bringing people together is a major of our work around Salford and to celebrate Volunteer Week 2018 we organised a meal where everyone cooked as a group or prepared something before eating – and talking – together.

Our ‘creative cook off’ was a chance to adapt and develop our work from a volunteers perspective. The result was a postcard and invitation that we can use as part of future networking.  So this postcard is now a very simple way of helping people remember us when we get out and about.