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We’re feeling festive here at Enjoolata HQ, and as we lead up to Christmas, we want to highlight the work of one of our favourite projects last year.

The Clock Tower Sanctuary (@theclocktowersantuary) works with young homeless people in the city to give them space, support and stability when they most need it. It is the city’s only drop-in day centre for younger homeless people, and last year the Sanctuary had over 4,000 visits from young people who had no home.

This time last year, we worked with the Sanctuary to fund some festive gift boxes to help spread Christmas cheer.

Local schools were put on decoration duties, and children and patrons of the charity contributed Christmas messages to show the guests at the centre that they were really thinking of them.

Boxes included headphones, mobile phones, socks and chocolate! Wherever possible, items were bought locally. The team also included gift vouchers so that their guests could go and choose things that they could get actual use from.

Upon receiving a box at the Christmas meal, a guest commented, ‘This was the worst Christmas ever… getting a food parcel, and great Christmas presents from CTS was a fab start to the new year. It made my week, my month even!’

Projects like this can make a massive difference to young people at this time of year. For more information about the Clocktower Sanctuary or support their work, follow them on Instagram or head over to their website.

The Bevy is a pub in the heart of Moulsecoomb in East Brighton.  But it is far more than Just a pub.

In 2010 the original Bevendean pub was closed down by the local authorities because of anti-social behaviour. Prior to this it had been a part of the community since 1937.

Since then the pub has been completely refurbished and reopened with funds raised by some extremely committed residents who breathed new life into it. It is now a pub and cafe and has become a hub for multiple local charities, community groups, lunch clubs and in general a place for all locals to get together. It is now a community venture, run by local people for local people and it is the first ever community pub on a housing estate in the whole of the UK.

‘Meals on Wheels’, one of the Bevy’s latest projects was launched within 24 hours of the pub’s closure on March 17th 2020 due to Covid. By the following Friday, 17 hot meals had been rolled out to vulnerable people all over Moulsecoomb and the service has been growing ever since, continuing throughout the lockdowns to deliver hot meals to peoples’ door steps several times a week.

The service has allowed a team of volunteers to check in on people, have a chat and run any errands that might need doing. Helen Jones, a founding member and integral cog of the Bevy described it as a ‘melting pot’. On arrival we were greeted with smiles from volunteers from all different ages and backgrounds, including Helen’s own young lodger who had been assigned with and was fully embracing the role of coordinating deliveries. Helen explained that they were managing to feed a lot of people who usually attend their lunch clubs.

Whilst some pay for the Meals on Wheels service, the Bevy itself subsidises the cost of the meals to those who can’t afford it.  Head Chef, Catherine runs a team of volunteers to cook up delicious, nourishing meals alongside volunteers and learners from St John’s College. St John’s is a specialist school and college in Brighton which works with young people who have complex learning disabilities, helping them to prepare for their young adult lives.

Pubs play such a vital role in the community. At a time when English pubs are in decline, the Bevy offers a refreshing new model.  Even in the face of Covid the team at the Bevy have found a way to bring an otherwise fragmented community together and really have helped combat isolation and loneliness among Moulsecoomb’s residents. It offers inspiration at a time when we all need it most.

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Enjoolata has proudly supported the Bevy with a Community Grant.

If you live in Moulsecoomb and Bevendean, have been told not to or cannot leave your home and would like to receive one of these meals, or know someone who would then please phone The Bevy on 01273 281009

Any profits made from the Pub/Cafe go directly back to the community. To donate to the Bevy click here.  https://www.thebevy.co.uk/donate/

Making It Out’s tagline is ‘Creative alternatives to repeat offending’. At their Portside workshop the team design and make furniture, installations and a range of products from small scale pieces to larger public art installations. The difference between MIO and a normal workshop is that the charity only works with people who have come from or are in the prison system. The outcome is a space where participants can access job opportunities and learn and grow in confidence in a creative and supportive environment.

I visited the MIO workshop at Portside Studios in Portslade on a scorching summer’s day in May. The output of the workshop spilled out onto the pavement;  its large wide open doors lined with murals and artwork made by participants revealing a hive of activity.

I met Founders Lucy and Mark and Ess, who Mark had met through the Choir with No Name – a Brighton choir consisting of people who have experienced Homelessness.

Ess has been coordinating and developing the ‘Stop Sign Memorial’ project since the beginning of lockdown. Through the ‘Stop Sign Memorial’ project, Making It Out are co-creating a large sculptural artwork to commemorate people who have lost their lives whilst homeless in Brighton and Hove.

It is important for the team that the artwork belongs to the people it will mean the most to. So they are inviting only people who have experienced homelessness either themselves or through loved ones to participate in the design and manufacture of the artwork.

Currently in its early stages, packs are being distributed to participants who are being invited to share drawings, write and even make small clay models about their experiences of homelessness.

One participant drew a picture of a disabled toilet key referring to it as ‘the key of life’, and then went on to describe how ‘you have to drink and take drugs to get through the night, noise and cold’ and in another account someone talked about how their friend had died of a drug addiction.

Even in its early stages the project offers a valuable insight for all of us who haven’t experienced homelessness into what life can be like on the streets.  It also has the potential to give a necessary and important platform to those who often find themselves without a voice and become a physical living memory of those who have been lost.

In the art room I was shown other striking pieces, beautiful self portraits and a powerful clay sculpture of a heart wrapped in barbed wire that had been started in prison and had the barbed wire added at a later date.

Making It Out directly challenges the stigma associated with prison and homelessness by simply producing great quality work and thought provoking, interesting art that really captures the collective voice of the outsider.

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The Stop Sign Memorial project was funded by an Enjoolata Community Grant. To find out more about Making It out and the Stop Sign Memorial project visit – makingitout.co.uk

Pier to Pier is a public artwork exploring the 14 miles of coastline between Brighton Pier and Worthing Pier as part of the Brighton Festival. During May and June it appeared in the form of a very bright orange bench that vanished every few days and reappeared at points overlooking the shoreline.

The bench had a speaker inside it which played audio fragments from 14 conversations recorded with a range of locals of all ages and backgrounds forming a kind of coastal oral history that examined the themes of ‘living on the edge’ or ‘working on the edge’.

When I visited the bench at Shoreham Promenade it was in late May, the sky was bright blue but beachgoers were still in jumpers, at the edge between a long wet spring and the beginning of summer.

After a few minutes sitting on the bench I gave up my seat to two local women keen to find out more about the project. I wandered off down the beach to listen to the audio track that I had downloaded from the website.

A coastal choir sang a beautiful, body-tingling rendition of ‘Blow the Wind Southerly’. Different voices came and went, touching on their experiences of living along the south coast.

One woman with Lebanese heritage described how living on the coast made her feel connected to Beirut, being close to the sea gave her a sense of freedom and serenity, allowing her to straddle both places but not quite having to belong to either.

A scientist spoke about his work documenting marine wildlife strandings and explored the impact that human activity has on nature, finishing with a hopeful quote about the future of the planet by David Attenbrough.

Ron, a fisherman from Goring described a night out on the boat during an eclipse of the moon when ‘There was nothing between the sea and the sky. I had to keep looking back, but out there was a complete black hole. Completely black, not anything, nothing at all.’

Another woman reminisced about Jellied eels, whilst others talked about the sea as a place of solace during the hardship and isolation of the pandemic.

As I wandered around the beach listening to this I tuned in to the seaweed, the changing light on the ripples, the smell of the sea, the washed up cuttlefish and the pebbles. I felt an affinity with those strangers in my ears.

My half an hour with the orange bench made me feel more connected with other people than I had since the beginning of the pandemic. It was a welcome reminder that whilst we all experience ‘life on the edge’ very differently, we are all unified by our experiences of nature and our relationship to the sea.

RAPT theatre received funding from Enjoolata’s Community Grant towards its “Pier to Pier project”. You can still listen to the recordings here.

https://www.pier-to-pier.com

Throughout its long history, sewing or stitching has been a formative experience in the lives of millions of women across many cultures. It is an activity that binds us all together no matter what language we speak or which country we are from.

[Read more…] about The Language of Sewing with The Network for International Women