Who’s Imagination Shapes Your Place?
By Tom Briggs, Made With Many
We’ve been asking this question a lot in the office recently. Who’s imagination shapes your place? Which of us gets to imagine a better future for our towns, villages, forests, embankments, fields and streets? Who amongst us gets to act on that imagined future? In this time of funding cuts and price rises, how much imagination are we actually using day to day to improve our lives and our neighbour’s lives?
Rob Hopkins in his book ‘What If to What Is’ says that we’re living through an imagination crisis and that the challenges we face as communities, cost of living, climate crisis, social injustice are just too big to be tackled without more imaginative solutions. Without us taking the time to imagine the world we want to live in and then taking action, as communities, to make it happen.
At Made With Many we’re in the imagination business but this question is really about power, who has it, and how we do our best to share it in Corby and Wellingborough. For example in Kingswood & Hazel Leys we were amongst the partners that created a mural trail with local residents turning gable ends into art galleries and in Wellingborough we helped make ‘Wailingborough‘ a podcast written and performed by local young people that brings our local ghosts to life.
Now we are asking for your imagination to shape our priorities. How we can we use creativity, art and culture to shape our places? To meet the challenges in our communities, and not only imagine a bright future but move toward it. We want to ask every resident of Corby and Wellingborough what they would like to make happen with us.
So, inevitably there is a survey you can do, we’d really like you to fill it in and share your ideas with us, and if we can we’ll try to make your ideas happen with you and with our communities. Some things we’ll get done by 2025, other things by 2028, some things might not be quite right for us. But then again, you’ve never needed our permission to act anyway.