Project Leads: Andy Smith
Title: A Citizen’s Assembly
Summary: A Citizen’s Assembly is a new play by Andy Smith and Lynsey O’Sullivan in which the audience act as people who have met to discuss the climate emergency. It is part of a wider research project called ‘plays for the people’, exploring ethical questions through collective acts of play.
The creation of this work was in part supported by the SALC social responsibility fund in 2023. The play had its first public performance at The Lowry Studio in January 2024, and will continue to be performed by us in both public and community settings in 2024. More information on the play and this short tour can be found here.
This application seeks support to develop and broaden our reach. We want to mentor and train two young theatre-makers to take the work to schools and community settings in Greater Manchester, enhancing opportunities for the continuation of the project.

Project Leads: Adele Aubrey
Title: Student Community Resilience Volunteering
Summary: During times of emergencies, members of the public often feel compelled to volunteer their support during an incident, these volunteers are known as spontaneous volunteers and can be very useful in supporting the emergency response and recovery to an incident.
Professor Duncan Shaw co-founded and co-chairs the National Consortium for Societal Resilience [UK+] which was established to enhance local resilience by sharing information across local resilience partnerships. This student volunteering project seeks to enhance student and public engagement links into this research, which aims to build ‘whole of society resilience’ and challenges the resilience community to take an integrated approach to build national resilience.
Students in the Humanitarian & Conflict Response Institute have an enthusiasm for volunteering opportunities in the themes of emergency response and community resilience. These opportunities provide valuable learning experiences, employability skills whilst also supporting the SALC’s social responsibility agenda.
The Student Community Resilience Volunteering project aims to build a cohort of students who are interested in supporting the response to emergencies by identifying them before an emergency takes place and providing some training and experience in emergency response and other key skills such as first aid. The project is working closely with the Greater Manchester Resilience Forum and volunteer organisations such as Salford Community and Voluntary Service.

Project Leads: Kate Dorney
Title: Accessing process and reflecting on practice: knowledge exchange and capacity building in creating and commissioning theatre by and for young people
Summary: This 12 month project aims to transfer knowledge and build capacity among teachers and students (as future creatives and commissioners) in supporting the development of socially engaged theatre for and with young people. In collaboration with Half Moon Theatre [https://www.halfmoon.org.uk] we will explore their methodology for commissioning and creating professional work for young people and how this can be effectively shared with HE students and teachers and early career creative artists. The project will commission a visual artist to work with Dorney, Berger and Half Moon in the observation and reflection on their process of play development through their Exchange for Change platform to create forms of creative, accessible documentation.
Working with Half Moon’s CEO & Director Chris Elwell and drawing on the company’s inclusive practice the project will produce an accessible ‘how-to-guide’ for creating work with young people (under 11) in order to develop and share industry best practice with HE students and teachers in the creative and performing arts. In doing so we will provide insight into, and resources for, sustainable and effective ways of supporting young artists to develop work in an increasingly hostile and volatile funding landscape.

Project Leads: Kerry Pimblott
Title: Burning Work: Archival Design
Summary: Over the past four years, Burning Work forums have connected African and Caribbean communities with academics and public authorities on issues of racial inequality evoked by the 2018 Windrush Scandal but with roots in decades of hostile approaches to immigration control and enforcement.
The archive component of Burning Work responds to the Windrush Lessons Learned Review 2020 which described a ‘lack of institutional memory’ within governing departments regarding the history of African Caribbean people within Britain. Therefore, the archive component of Burning Work seeks to address this lack of institutional memory by creating an archive collection to record the work of groups across Manchester organising to address the ‘serious harm’ evidenced in testimonies within legal surgeries, forums and reports.
The Burning Work forums have been co-designed with a coalition of community leaders from Windrush Defenders Legal C.I.C., Moss Side and Hulme Development Trust, Arawak Walton Housing Association, Cariocca Business Park and others.
The Burning Work archive collection was setup by Christxpher Oliver in 2021 at the AIU RACE Centre with the support of Laila Benhaida and Maya Sharma to hold documents and audio-visual material relating to Burning Work. This SALC-supported project will create an archive index and catalogue in addition to a Zine publication, which will be an accessible guide to the archive collection. Portraits will be taken of participants from the Windrush Generation which will form part of a new Windrush Day 2024 campaign on Billboards across Manchester.

Project Leads: Ned Blackburn
Title: Look What We’ve Done
Summary: Look What We’ve Done is a devised piece of comedy and theatre exploring the issue of the individual and the industry, the local and the global, the public versus the powerful – who is responsible for mitigating climate change?
Following a sold out run at Partisan Collective in Manchester, Look What We’ve Done is heading to the world-renowned Edinburgh Fringe Festival 2024. The team is formed of Manchester based theatre-makers with a drive to alert and awaken audiences to the impact, hypocrisies and urgency of the climate crisis.
Amongst its comedy and chaos the audience are held to account and asked to consider how their actions affect the future of the planet and what they can do about it.

Project Leads: Ryan Woods
Title: Zimbabwe – Soundscapes and Memory
Summary: Members of Zimbabwean Action in Solidarity and Sound Artist Ryan Woods will come together in Leicester to share sensorial experiences of leaving their former homes in Zimbabwe. The project will focus on issues of migration, identity, ecology and loss. The group will explore the soundscapes of Zimbabwe through their memories, recorded archives, deep listening practices and performances from their own traditional choir. They will explore the soundscapes of the UK through deep listening, soundwalks and field recordings. They will respond to these explorations with their own soundscape compositions which will give insights into their perspectives on the ecologies of places and the project will culminate in a collated soundscape composition made from the recordings and insights of the group.

Project Leads: Cemal Alomar
Title: My number is 72 (working title)
Summary: This project is a short film being made by Cemal Alomar, currently an MA Film Studies student. Cemal is an experienced journalist and filmmaker, with 10+ years as a documentary director, educator, TV reporter and writer, and a winner of the Samir Kassir Award from the EU in 2016. This film is an independent project that develops a script submitted by Cemal for his directed practice project. These proposed funds are to support the ambition, collaborative ethical approach and social impact of the project. The film is inspired by Cemal’s own experiences as a former political prisoner and it explores a detainee’s experience in solitary confinement. When a prison riot suddenly occurs, the prisoner’s situation changes dramatically as a new system of communication is created through manholes, which renews the will to challenge and the hope of escape.