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WHAT WE DO
The Community Brain believes in liberating people’s brilliance through participation, permission and play with a purpose.
Participation
Inclusive, informal and participant-led – helping people create engaging stories and events to celebrate their community to build the environment and future they will share. With no formal joining or membership, there’s room for all.
People are at the heart of all we do. We work with communities that may be struggling to find their voice, their story, what makes them unique and distinctive and we try to harness the natural brilliance of the individuals that already exist within communities and show them a route to engagement that suits them and will help them affect the changes where they live.
Read more about some of our participatory work in these projects:
Permission
Giving people the permission they don’t really need to be as brilliant as they already can be
– happy to decide for themselves how they want to participate.
We talk about permission because through our work we have found so many people that have so much to give, so many ideas and skills along with such a wealth of experience and passions that have been led to believe through a surround sound of negativity and pessimism, that they can’t affect change, they can’t create and influence the place they live and that creativity and play is from a time gone past. We try and simply give them ‘permission’ to release their brilliance into their local community and celebrate it alongside other brilliant people.
Read more about how we’ve used community buildings to give people permission to share their brilliance:
Play
Providing safe places for people to play with ideas – rediscovering the power of their imagination, creativity and potential to change the world for themselves and those around them.
We believe in the transformative power of allowing everyone to play and have fun. We like to think that we create playgrounds for adults as well as children, so that adults can remember what it was like to be a child who believed they could do anything. Bringing people together under the banner of doing something that's 'just fun' or 'silly' instead of earnestly forcing the issue that we're building stronger communities is our way to lay the foundations. People don't feel forced, or preached to – they get involved because they sense they are going to enjoy themselves.
Read more about the fun we’ve had building giant board games, inventing new sports such as Suburban Skiing and Bread Golf and curating festivals such as:
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Purpose
Enabling people to command their own story rather than the one written for them – a real say in their own future, the wellbeing of the area and the environment where they live.
By using participation, permission and play we aim to provide people with the resolve, confidence and passion to pursue ambitious visions for their communities. We aim to support communities filled with purpose that can influence change through involvement in policy setting, regeneration, asset ownership, social enterprise and economic development.
Read more about projects that have allowed communities to develop a shared sense of purpose:
'We don't stop playing games because we grow old; we grow old because we stop playing games'