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Community Engagement Seed Fund 2021: Grants announced

13 July 2021

The Community Engagement Seed Fund is a small grants scheme designed to support the development of engagement activities and partnership opportunities with east London communities.

CASA x Forest Gate Community Garden networking event. Credit: Ondre Roach

We are delighted to announce the four successful grants in the 2020-21 programme, through a rolling round of funding.

If you are interested in a community engagement seed fund grant, the latest round will be launching in late summer. Email Briony Fleming for more information.

 

Vicky Price: UCL Special Collections

The New Curators Project


Building on previous collaborative successes, UCL Special Collections and Newham Heritage Month are working together to deliver a community curatorship project especially for young adults aged 18-24 from Newham, Waltham Forest, Hackney and Tower Hamlets. The project will provide training in skills and competencies for working in the cultural heritage sector, group workshops and support in creating a collaborative exhibition for the Newham Heritage Month programme.  

It is hoped that this can become a recurring annual project, developing an ‘alumni’ of community curators who can go on to enrich future programming from this partnership.


Dinah Lammiman: Anthropology

Avenue Road Down Memory Lane


Focussed on a social housing estate in Leytonstone, on the outskirts of Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park, this project hopes to capture a sense of place and community in a part of Waltham Forest, due for dramatic redevelopment and regeneration. 

Working closely with residents, community groups and media students from nearby Leytonstone Schools, students from UCL’s Immersive Factual Storytelling course will co-create Virtual Reality experiences with residents that build on local knowledge and memories of this place and the relationship between the estate and its community.


Shoba Poduval: Institute of Epidemiology and Health

Diverse voices: increasing BAME representation in health research at UCL


Ethnic minority groups face a multitude of health and socioeconomic inequalities, including a higher risk of death from Covid-19 compared with people of white ethnicity. However people from ethnic minority backgrounds are historically under-represented in health research, and understanding of why these inequalities occur is limited. Improving engagement of ethnic minority communities in health research requires imagination and innovation, beyond the methods traditionally used in academia.

Working in partnership with Kois Miah, a photographer based in east London specialising primarily on projects that combine photography with community participation for social change, the project will deliver photography workshops with community groups in east London, sharing skills in visual storytelling to create new tools for self-advocacy and representation.

Participants will be invited to creatively express themselves and tell their own stories of health, illness, inequality or barriers to participation in research, through their images. The visual storytelling will perform a dual role as both a form of creative expression and a way to document lived experiences.  


Tim Adlam: Computer Science / Global Disability Innovation Hub

Integrating Arts into Disability Innovation


This project will seek to establish collaborations between east London artists, disabled people and GDI Hub researchers to explore and improve the inclusion of both creative practice, artists and disabled people into the research undertaken at the GDI Hub.

The project will seek to explore movement and sensation: using technology to capture voluntary and involuntary responses and movement, and support creative expression of human experience by both disabled and non-disabled people together. The project will seek to discover new ways of thinking about research and its impact, bringing together art, technology and the lived experience of disabled people in east London.

Click here to find out more about the Community Engagement Seed Fund