30/08/2011

The Small Change Forum: ingenious people make better places

One day conference hosted by community arts organisation, Multistory, and the Centre for Development and Emergency Practice (CENDEP), Oxford Brookes University

Friday 7 October 2011
Oxford Brookes University, Oxford


Creative cultural action, including participatory arts, as the catalyst for community development is the theme of this one day conference. To these ends it will explore how small, practical and mostly low budget creative interventions, if carefully targeted, can act as catalysts for big and long lasting change designed to improve people’s environments and opportunities. This simple but powerful ideal demands significant changes to the way we think, do and organise in order to sustain, which will be explored as both theory and practice at the conference.

The conference will be organised into keynote presentations, thematic presentations, afternoon break out discussion sessions, and final plenary discussions. Thematic presentations (case studies, papers and reflective pieces) will be organised into the following Small Change themes: doing, thinking and sustaining. These will be presented by practitioners from non governmental organisations (NGOs), creative arts and academic sectors.

Keynote presentations will be made by development practitioner, Nabeel Hamdi, and community arts consultant, François Matarasso. Thematic sessions will include presentations from Scott Burnham (independent consultant), Penny Evans (Knowle West Media Centre), Barbara Wood (Schumacher Foundation), Jamie Young (RSA), Julia Slay (New Economics Foundation), Mukul Dhawan (AzkoNobel: Let’s Colour Project), Liljana Alcheva (Habitat for Humanity, Macedonia), and Danielle Smith (NGO, Sandblast).

This event will launch The Small Change Forum, designed to promote small change learning and practice through its documentation and analysis of case files. Each event, as part of this initiative, will disseminate new ideas, tools, methods, practical wisdoms, principles in order to inform teaching and practice, and to create a policy environment conducive to change.


Registration and Costs
The conference fee is £30 / £20 concession. For registration please go to:


For further information please contact Jeni Burnell, Forum Chair, at: jburnell@brookes.ac.uk

No comments: