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Wonderland – 2023 Art Exhibition and Scholarship ceremony

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Wonderland

As we approach the Summer break it feels like the perfect time to look back at the incredibly special summer showcase event we held at the beginning of July. Sponsored by MTD Group and hosted by Conductor London, One Crown Place and Sun Street Hotel in the City of London, we celebrated the creative achievements of all our participants in the last year.

Wonderland Exhibition –  July 2023. Big thanks to Patrick Fry for the amazing graphics!

The exhibition was absolutely brimming with incredible art, all produced by our participants during our programme of creative workshops throughout the year. Guests on the night viewed ceramics, visual art, fashion, film and photographs. All created by people affected by homelessness.

Headpieces on display from our ‘Wearable Art as Fashion’ series of workshops

Beautiful ceramics designed and created by participants

Images from our Analogue Photography workshops

This year we wanted to make the exhibition as interactive as possible so we treated our guests to live screen printing workshops run by the wonderful Nicole Line as well as drawing workshops led by Joshua Beatty. We even had our own DJ booth, designed, built and painted by a group of participants along with Poor Collective.

Screen printing workshop so guests could give it a go too!

One guest loved the print so much that she printed it onto her trousers! Looks so good!

Our DJ booth created together with Poor Collective

As we all gathered together to celebrate the creativity in the room, we felt so privileged that participants Sam and Deon agreed to speak to the audience about their own Accumulate experiences. Sam, as a participant and scholarship winner in 2022, and Deon who is taking part in the MATTA programme, working so hard to inspire creativity in others. Listen to their stories in their own words via our Instagram posts. Sam’s is HERE Deon’s is HERE

Sam spoke about this Accumulate journey

Deon spoke about her experience as a participant on our MATTA course.

As part of the evening were just so excited to present certificates to each participant who attended our workshops as well as the highly anticipated scholarships to selected participants so they can continue their developing their creativity in higher education.

Participants were all presented with a certificate by Chair of Trustees Michelle

After a heartwarming speech from our Director and Founder Marice Cumber, our Chair of Trustees Michelle presented the scholarships to each winner along with their delighted sponsor.  They will study, fully funded, on Access to Higher Education courses in Fine Art, Design and Digital Media and Fashion at either Ravensbourne University or Morley College. Huge congratulations!

Stuart won the Accumulate Ian Shaw photography prize and also received an award of a camera and a year of mentoring by tutor Giulio Mazzarini.

Congratulations Alicia and thank you to sponsor Debra from Grove End Housing

Congratulations Ya’aesh and thank you to sponsor Debra from Grove End Housing

Congratulations to Alexandria and thank you to BOP Consulting for their sponsorship

Congratulations also to scholarship winners Hayley and Sana (not pictured) and sponsors AHMM Architects and EC Bid London.

To round off the celebrations, we were treated to a fashion show of participants all modelling the incredible headpieces they created in our series of workshops ‘Wearable Art as Fashion’. The show was led by previous Accumulate scholarship winner Nikol who really got the crowd going! Check out a video of the show HERE

Nikol led the fashion show!

Amazing pieces! Well done to all the participants.

Accumulate, after it all, is about community. We are so thrilled that so many participants past and present attend our events. A true testament to the experiences they have taken part in and the lasting friendships they have formed.

This was a truly special evening. The perfect showcase for all our participants for their achievements this year. We can’t wait to see what’s next for you all.

Photo credits: Ben Peters Photography

 

 

 

 

 

 

Utopia: A New World for Everyone

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Design, Make & Build Your New World

Brand new for 2022, this project started in April this year. The brief for our participants, to create their own ‘New World.’ Over ten sessions, the final works will be displayed at this summer’s Waterloo Festival which is attended by around 500 people each year. By completing this series of workshops, participants also have the chance to win one of our annual Accumulate scholarships to attend an Access to Higher Education course at either Ravensbourne University or Morley College!

Workshop poster

We are thrilled to partner with Allford Hall Monaghan Morris Architects on this project, giving our participants the chance to work with professional architects and designers to bring their vision to life. We are also so grateful to our funders Arts Council England and Foyle Foundation for their support.

Collage inspiration

Building up their own ‘Utopia’ ideas using collages, sketches and mood boards was a great starting point. So much imagination and thought going into each individual design. Each participant has their own sketchbook so they can carry on developing their ideas and creativity in each session and outside the workshops. The group also worked on models creating ‘mini me’s’ that will live in their own ideal world.

Creating mini me’s! Photo Credit: Chez Christiealice

Discussing and presenting ideas to each other is an important part Accumulate, so everyone can engage, learn and support each other. Climate change and sustainability are major themes for discussion in this project, with tutors showing how they incorporate such important elements into building projects and how they would be central to a new Utopia. Participants took this expertise and then discussed how they would like to incorporate it into their own plans before starting to build their own Utopia models with a focus on the environment.

Photo Credit: Chez Christiealice

Photo Credit: Chez Christiealice

As the weeks past it has been incredible to see how much their model-making skills have developed and their confidence has increased – especially when it comes to discussing their own works and explaining their vision to others. They are an amazing group of people, giving so much support and encouragement to everyone. Our creative community is flourishing!

Photo Credit: Chez Christiealice

Within this project, participants have tried their hand at embroidery and textile design, creative writing, music and voice workshops. All of these elements have been incorporated into the final project including a song that the group have written and will perform at the festival!

Working on lyrics in the Music & Voice workshop

Ten weeks of hard work and creativity are now complete and we are so thrilled to be able to present the participant’s final works to our supporters with a private view event on 7th July, prior to the exhibition at the Waterloo Festival. At this event, we are also presenting the scholarships to selected participants so they can continue their creative education. Join us! We’d love to see you there to help celebrate. DM us over on Instagram for all the details!

 

 

 

Accumulate 2020/21 Showcase Event

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The end of June brought us what felt like a rare chance to join together with participants, supporters and friends to look back at an incredible year. The aim of Accumulate, the Art School for the Homeless, is to improve peoples’ lives through creativity and we are proud to say that we have achieved this despite a very challenging year. A year when we couldn’t meet as a group and our participants were more isolated, and feeling even more lonely and vulnerable than ever. Even though our annual jam packed exhibition had to be reinvented for 2021, we still managed a celebration of what we have achieved through our showcase which was held at The Barbican, in Cinema 1.

Accumulate at The Barbican

We premiered our Accumulate 20/21 film, which you can watch HERE, in which we celebrated all that we have done over the past year. From pivoting during lockdown to online workshops, to distributing over 4000 Art Kits to hostels across the UK and launching the Book of Homelessness, it has been extremely busy but rewarding time for all of us.

Participants Stories

During the event, we were honoured to hear from three past Accumulate scholarship winners who took to the stage and spoke so candidly about their own personal experiences of homelessness and how they were empowered to move forwards positively with their lives. It really was very moving to hear these stories and the impact that art and creativity can have. Check out all three videos HERE

Nikol DeHaan speaking at the Accumulate Showcase. Photo Credit, Williamz Omope

 

Mitchel Ceney speaking at the Accumulate Showcase. Photo credit Williamz Omope

 

LisaLouise MacGregor speaking at the Accumulate Showcase. Photo credit Williamz Omope

Scholarship Awards

This event also gave us the opportunity to present our annual scholarship awards, giving the recipient the opportunity to continue their creative education at Ravensbourne University in September. We are so thankful to each scholarship funder for supporting these awards, without who they just would not be possible.

The well deserved winners were:
  • Keattch family scholarship awarded to Jade Amoli-Jackson
  • Say Property travel bursary scholarships to Whitney Stewart and Reuben Dehaan. (The Say Property scholarship is covered through sales of Book of Homelessness, as they bought nearly 200 copies!)
  • Jon Drori scholarship to Anita Karklina
  • The Keattch Family also awarded  £1000 each to Mitchel, Ola, Nikol and Anne to help with their continuing creative studies.

Debra Yudolph from Say Property presenting two scholarships. Photo credit Williamz Omope

 

 Keattch Family presentation. Photo credit Williamz Omope

Huge congratulations to all award winners. We are so proud of you all and can’t wait to see your continuing achievements. Thank you also to everyone who was able to attend this event and who followed along on social media with us. We are so happy to have your support on this very special and happy day.

 

 

 

 

Accumulate April Update!

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April 2021 has been a busy month for Accumulate with some exciting new and continuing projects and good news for Accumulate!

Return to The Barbican

We were delighted to be able to return to the learning space at the Barbican Centre early in April to resume our face to face workshops after such a long time. We are equally delighted to have teamed up with the global creative design advertising association D&AD who provided one of their student briefs to design a promotional campaign for lego bricks for this series of workshops.

A new series of workshops began in April 2021

We were very grateful to have a great haul of lego donated to us to use for this project through the generosity of the team at the Barbican and D&AD. The local community in Crouch End were also a huge help donating bricks after a Facebook shout out! The group were so excited to see this mountain of lego and to take part in an Accumulate project that is completely new and different.

Using Lego bricks as our creative medium

 

Our aim on this project is the reverse the hierarchy, bringing top-level creative expertise, teaching and knowledge to people who wouldn’t normally be able to access it. Industry experts Giulio Mazzarini and Natalie Prout from Jones Knowles Ritchie joined us to talk the group through how strategy and creativity work in an advertising environment. We are also very excited to welcome industry speakers from leading creative agencies including Saboteur, GEM, Bullet Proof and We Are Social to join us on this project in the coming weeks to share their expertise and industry insights with Accumulate participants. This will be an amazing opportunity for our participants to gain access to this level of knowledge and also be able to showcase their talent and potential.

Joined by industry experts from JKR Global

At the end of this project in June, there will be an exhibition of the participants work along with three scholarships awarded to selected participants to attend Ravensbourne University! Watch this space!

Donation from Grand Matter

Illustration agency Grand Matter organised a fundraising drive for Accumulate with their super-talented illustrators designing a beautiful collection of blankets which were then sold to raise money for Accumulate. We are so thankful and humbled by this support. Even more so in that it has meant that we can now purchase tablets for the group working on the D&AD project we are currently running, so all our learners can digitise their own creative work. Huge thanks to all the team at Grand Matter.

Students digitise their creativity

Accumulate Art Kit workshops continue

Our Accumulate Art Kits project is still going strong. We ran an excellent ‘Train the Trainer’ session this month with the team from London architecture firm AHMM who put together and led a model making activity with a group of support workers from homeless hostels across the country.

Train the Trainer session with AHMM

This session was so well received by the group and they are now ready to run their own sessions with clients from the hostels they work in using the kits that we provide. We are so pleased to have AHMM join us, giving their time, expertise and support.

Accumulate in Positive News

We were very excited to see the graphic novel that we published last year, Book of Homelessness, featured in an article by Positive News! You can read the full article HERE. We had such a great response to the feature with a great surge of support. The money we have raised from the sales of our book has meant that we have been able to fund a scholarship for an Accumulate participant to attend Ravensbourne University to study on the Access to HE course in Design & Digital Media. As our founder, Marice Cumber told Positive News ‘This is a very special thing. It means that the creativity of a group of people affected by homelessness will support someone else who is homeless to change their lives through creative education.’

Feature in Positive News

Click HERE to read more about Book of Homelessness and purchase your own copy

 

Follow @Accumulate_Ldn on Instagram, Twitter & Facebook!

 

 

 

Radio Station for the Homeless

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The First of its Kind!

This Autumn has brought a jam-packed schedule to Accumulate as we are getting ready to launch our brand new project, A Radio Station for the Homeless!

A podcast taster session. Photo credit @benpetersphoto

This project will give our participants, all young homeless people, the opportunity to digitally broadcast their stories. They will also gain the technical skills needed to present, record and edit podcasts. We were thrilled to receive funding from Nesta UK as part of their Amplified programme.  A fund supporting cultural and creative organisations that seek to develop digital ideas that generate social impact. We are also so happy to be partnering once again with Ravensbourne University London whose amazing tutors will pass on their digital expertise to train our participants.

Our participants working with tutor Natalie Orchard. Photo credit @benpetersphoto

A Voice to a Marginalised Community

This project gives our group of young people a chance to tell their stories, giving a much-needed voice to a marginalised community. ‘It’s not all about being homeless!’ says our founder & Director Marice Cumber. ‘It will be a diverse and creative content made and broadcasted by people affected by homelessness – their music, their stories, their spoken word, their poetry, their interviews and programmes about the issues that matter to them.’

Working with Ravensbourne tutor Jack Brown. Photo credit @samvholt

Training by Industry Experts

We have been lucky enough to introduce some amazing guest speakers and tutors to work with our group. Industry experts worked with them on areas from creative branding to pitching & presentation skills and technical broadcast training.

The group with The Receipts podcast host Milena Sanchez

 

Pitching & Presentation skills with Soho Radio’s Claire Lynch. Photo credit @benpetersphoto

 

Branding workshop with Fahud Ahned, Senior Creative at Design Bridge. Photo credit @benpetersphoto

 

Technical skills with BBC producer & engineer Peter Monnery. Photo credit @benpetersphoto

Empowerment and Confidence

It has been amazing to see how far this group have come from our first taster sessions to now when our group are pitching their subject ideas to industry professionals! Each member of the group’s confidence and self-esteem has grown week on week, empowering them to a more positive outlook.

Pitch day! Presenting to industry professionals. Photo credit @samvholt

Stay tuned, six podcast subjects have now been selected and our group will go one to use their new-found skills to produce and broadcast.

Accumulate Summer 2018

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Wow, what a Summer we have had! As Autumn approaches, it’s great to reflect on what has been a really exciting time for our project with so much more to come!

We won an award!

June saw Accumulate highly commended by the Festival of Learning. This organisation celebrates the benefits of learning and the achievements of adults who have used learning to transform their lives. It was such a proud moment to see one of our 2017 scholarship winners; Jay collect this award. It was presented by Professor Linda Drew, Director and CEO of Ravensbourne University.

Creative Leaders 50

Following this, we were simply over the moon to see our inspiring founder and Director Marice Cumber named in Creative Review’s ‘Creative Leaders 50’. Recognition of people driving change in the creative industries and incredibly well deserved. Many congrats Marice!

Process at Somerset House

In July, we took part in ‘Process’ a two day festival of independent media & a zine fair held at Somerset House in Central London. This was a great platform for us to promote the work of Accumulate and our latest zine ‘Decay.’

 

This zine is the result of a collaboration between House of St Barnabas, Accumulate and Ravensbourne University. This collection of words, images and random thoughts by people affected by homelessness is now in its third issue. It is a really great showcase for the power of creativity, with organisations and individuals working together to form their own creative community. Click here to buy your own copy of Decay 3 and help us support more people affected by homelessness find empowerment through creativity.

The Great Fete

In August we took part in the Great Fete at Alexandra Palace in North London. Participants from hostels all over London came together to take part in this workshop. They took portraits using a polaroid camera of those attending the event. The images were then all linked together to create a ‘Palace Quilt’. This was such a great project to work on, bringing different parts of the community together to craft, share skills and make something collectively. The finished piece was then displayed by the festival.

Scholarship Winners Enrol!

As the end of August came, we were so proud to see the happy smiling faces of our 2018 scholarship winners as they enrolled at University. They will be studying on the Access to HE Diploma course in Design and Digital Media at Ravensbourne University.  This has all been made possible by our amazing sponsors Brickworks London, Straight Forward Design and Ravensbourne University. Exciting times are certainly ahead, and we are so happy to have you follow our journey with us.