Dreams + Aspirations for a community space on York Central
A place to spend time.
On the 4th February, nearly 50 of us gathered, in the only way we know how nowadays, on zoom, to play around and explore what a community owned and led space might be and mean for the people living in, and around York central.
It was so brilliant to see so many people come together around this, and we are pulling together a proposal (we’ll post it here) from all of the ideas and conversations with an aim of progressing forward with some tangible actions - please come along to the next workshop which will help us self organise and steer us towards making it real.
Before the Dreams and Aspirations session, we asked participants to send us images of places that they want to spend time, which we have collated below, just to get us in the mood of sharing those places and spaces in our lives that we love to spend time, and try to think about why we love them, and what elements might be possible for York - thank you everyone for sending these!
At the session itself we heard from Lorna Prescott, from CoLab Dudley, who walked us through their work on Dudley’s Highstreet, through their approaches and ways of working. We also heard from Paul Kelly, who spoke to us about Homebaked CLT and their story so far. We’ve posted the video of the session below if you missed it, or if you want to replay!
After a bit of Q+A we used the ‘crazy 8’s’ activity to explore the topic further, and we’ve posted some of the jam boards here for you to see. With a bit of reflection, you begin to see clear strands and some common themes, which will help us to start to plan future activity going forward, and potentially help us to organise ourselves into steering groups to make stuff happen within our different areas of interest. We’ll start to outline these plans in a proposal, so watch this space…
The group that came together was so full of energy to make some things happen, so our proposed next steps look at making decisions about governance, team structure and areas of focus, enabling us to take some steps closer to our vision. The question around ‘whose voice is not in the room’ we feel will always be there, but for now, we need to give ourselves permission to move forwards, with the intention of growing our insight and understanding of the wider community as we go.
Please join us to make some sense of all the work so far on the 17th February, in our ‘Making it Real’ workshop with Paul which will help us to identify a clear path towards all those dreamy futures. For now, keep dreaming, and keep safe.