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 and also provide further details about what’s going on at the moment.
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.

Suitable for a wide range of communities, you can currently get involved in the following projects in and around East Salford:

• Irwell Walks – a series of walks and adventures along or near the Irwell where you can meet the Collector. Including the Lost Canal on Friday 20 August.
• Stage Directions – summer of theatre-making for young people aged 8 plus, including Carnival Camps for families on 21/22 August and 28/29 August. Culminating in a two-week creative camp (23 August – 3 Sept) and performance ‘An Unpredictable Future’ in Buile Hill Park on Friday 3 September
• Fun Palace– “What a load of rubbish!” our fourth Fun Palace at our creative hub Cobden Works: Saturday 2 October 11:00-16:00

We are also working with Albion Academy on the Tree(s) of Knowledge transition project supporting young people as they move from primary to secondary school along with partner organisations Broughton Trust, Mary Burns, Social Adventures and Start

Additionally, our Cobden Works outdoor arts creative hub is at the heart of East Salford and East Salford is at the centre of our hyperlocal approach with the Neighbourhood team, local organisations and residents. 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. We hold an annual Fun Palace which takes place the first weekend in October.

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 – particularly in parks and green spaces
• 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 and walking, using an area of our expertise to celebrate the City’s waterways while going on short journeys – from the hidden and forgotten (such as the Irwell or the Lost Canal) as well as the regenerated and modern (as seen at Salford Quays)

Volunteering and bringing people together is a major part 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.

heck out some photos from the Emperor’s New Tent appearing at Green Grosvenor Park