Together with partners Spread the Word and the London Libraries Development Agency, we worked with all of Newham’s ten elected community forums to organise the borough's first festival devoted to reading and writing.

The aims of the project were:

to use the written and the spoken word as a means of promoting social cohesion in one of London ’s most ethnically diverse boroughs;
to promote the role of the borough’s ten community forums and effectively connect local residents with their forums;
to produce a festival legacy to tie in with other areas of council work.

We implemented a strategy to involve the borough’s elected community forums. This involved the formation of a working group with representatives from each forum and a chairs’ panel to judge the schools competition.

We led the partners in organising the logistics for the event including the event planning and staffing. We also spearheaded the evening’s showcase event demonstrating examples of talent from across the borough.

We also successfully engaged the borough’s schools, libraries and community centres in the event. Every Newham pupil got the opportunity to enter a short story competition, with each entry published. Competition entrants were encouraged to attend the event with the prospect of receiving an advance copy of their book Word for Word. We also worked with libraries to promote the event by taking part in reading group meetings, organising creative writing workshops and running a competition in both libraries and local service centres to encourage residents to express an interest in a workshop / performance.

Attracting almost 2,000 attendees, the event successfully engaged a large number of local residents with their community forum and also laid the groundwork for a greater interest in local authors, creative writing and performance.

The following quotes were captured on the day:

“Events like this help to foster a great community spirit”

“I think the Community Forums are a good way through which the Council can get peoples views”

“Bringing kids to events like this helps them to meet their role models. That’s great”

“The best thing about the festival for me is the coming together of different people from different ethnic backgrounds”

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