St Raphael’s Pt 2
Project
St Raphael’s Estate
Client
Karakusevic Carson Architects
Location
Brent - North West London
Press
Building on the relationship we are made with the community back in 2019, we created a series of Social Value initiatives working with the community of St Raphael’s Estate in Brent and collaborating with Brent Council and Karakusevic Carson Architects.
Our work saw us design and deliver a series of projects for young residents and the wider community, with a focus on job creation, economic investment and capacity building, creating strong foundations in order to grow and develop community programming skills and local businesses support.
Back in 2019 we worked with a youth collective of St Raphael’s Estate residents (see here). During this engagement process, several key insights were discovered that allowed us to reflect and respond, so when we returned to work with the community in October 2021, our offer was in direct respond to residents feedback.
CULTURAL IMPACT TEAM
We formed a Cultural Impact Team on St Raphael’s Estate, comprising of five young residents, who together, researched the needs of their community on the estate, to help co-design a series of workshops, training sessions and community cohesion projects, ahead of the launch of a new community incubator fund set up by Karakusevic Carson Architects. Along with their research, the impact team identified local cultural assets (groups, collectives and organisations) in order to understand how different organisations and individuals approach community programming and engagement, exploring opportunities for collaboration.
Impact team member Kayleigh visited Metroland Cultures to see what they have on offer and how they work to deliver creative and cultural events for the community of Brent as part of her paid role. Kayleigh said,
“It was a very insightful day, and I was able to gain contextual insight into how the charity is run. It was good to see that they also reinforced the idea of making sure that the community actively had a voice, as opposed to dictating the cultural programme by themselves.”
SPACE FOR GIRLS PROGRAMME
Following an intensive outreach period, connecting to local schools, organisations and resident groups, our Space for Girls programme began working in collaboration with a team of young girls and women living on the St Raph’s Estate. The programme sat alongside the Cultural Impact Team. The aim of the programme was to explore safe spaces for girls, something a young female resident association member had shared with us during our engagement back in 2019 “what spaces do girls access when they are too old for the playground”.
The programme looked at concerns about safety, physical and holistic space for young women on residential estates.
Tiffany Osumah, life-coach and key collaborator on the programme, worked with Beyond the Box to structure a programme that introduced an exciting hybrid of contemporary wellbeing training and co-design workshops. This allowed the young women to explore an open a dialogue in regards to well-being in their neighbourhood, challenging attitudes towards mental health and discovering how the young girls can support their peers through mentoring. Each of the participants expressed their unique desire for taking part and cited how they aim to not only learn more about themselves and the effects that the physical spaces in which they live affect their mental health, but also providing space to engage in dialogue in a safe space with other young residents.
The hybrid of mental health, wellbeing and co-design is yet to be explored on a large scale when it comes to engagement on regeneration scheme for neighbourhoods. Eight facilitated sessions structured by Osumah tackled topics including, but not limited to, families, mental health, self-esteem, goals and achievements, each chosen by the young participants. Each session was sequenced to allow for the young women to tackle more challenging topics in an environment that become welcoming and more familiar as the learning progressed. The eight sessions were concluded with the young women exploring how the skills gained during their wellbeing sessions could be introduced as a tool for discussing the physical realm, space and design.
Complimenting the wellbeing sessions were a series of workshops designed in collaboration with Karakusevic Carson Architects, the practice leading on the architectural designs for St Raphael's Estate regeneration scheme, working along with landscapers Periscope. The team gained an understanding for how designs are structured for their local area, with the young women and girls feeding back their views and ideas. These co-design sessions engaged directly with the personal needs of young women on the estate and how design can respond to those.
Exploring these two elements together created a programme for young women to utilise the familiarity, patience and compassion built into the wellbeing sessions and incorporate them into an approach for understanding spatial design.
COMMUNITY INCUBATOR FUND
As part of this commission, we worked to launch a new community fund aimed to benefit residents living on St Raphael’s Estate as part of their social value commitment to residents and funded by Karakusevic Carson Architects. The Cultural Impact Teams research into what workshops, programmes and events residents would like to see in their community, develop the funds priorities ahead of its launch.
Beyond the Box provided support to residents and resident groups/organisations and charities, who wanted to apply to the incubator fund, providing support sessions to equip residents with tools to help with their funding application and with project planning and budgeting for their idea.
A panel comprising of members of the resident association, Karakusevic Carson Architects and Brent Council awarded a range of projects, which included Hypnotic Dance, whose proposal included delivering dance lessons for the local community to promote better mental health and emotional well-being and local freelancer Kayleigh, with Our Local Hero’s project, which will see young people engaging in creative workshops to create a comic book celebrating local hero’s. The fund also awarded Predz UK, a local resident and international DJ and musician funds to deliver an industry-leading music-skills programme for young people interested in songwriting, music production, DJ-ing skills and artist development.
The community fund also awarded funds to Willesden Scout Group to provide activities for children over the summer holidays and local resident Asif with funds to run regular sports activities for residents and the wider community.
