Camberwell College Citizens – what does art and design have to do with building community power?

How can art and design be used as a tool to listen, and community organise? Can a university share power and really deliver its ‘civic agenda’? And how does a festival lead to real world change on the things that matter most to a community?

Camberwell College of Arts, part of University of the Arts London, has been exploring how to use art and design methodologies to build long-term relationships with local communities. Partnered with Citizens UK and working in a hyperlocal way, we joined Southwark and Peckham Citizens focusing our energy on local needs including housing, health justice and living wage. Our activity includes the Festival for Community Organising which has led to real-world change by impacting local housing actions, ESOL and Living Wage campaigns; for example, being part of actions that resulted in The Globe accrediting.

Our work has been coined by Citizens UK ‘the Camberwell model’, acknowledging the mutual benefit working to our strengths brings to the local alliance and the university’s social purpose agenda. If selected, we will share our initial ideas and creative projects that show how a large bureaucratic university can adapt its practices to embrace the agile nature of locally embedded community organising.