First Small Change Forum

The Small Change Forum: Ingenious people make better places

 Friday 7 October, 2011

Oxford Brookes University

Hosted by Multistory and the Centre for Development and Emergency Practice (CENDEP), Oxford Brookes University.  

Today's challenges to making places demands big change to our established norms and assumptions. The Small Change approach starts with a common senses assumption: if you want to achieve something big, you start with something small and you start where it counts.

Cultural action, including participatory arts, as the catalyst for community development is the theme of this first 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. This will be explored as both theory and practice at the conference.

The conference will be organised into keynote presentations by Nabeel Hamdi and François Matarasso, 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.

This event will launch the Small Change Forum, designed to promote small change learning and practice through its documentation and analysis of case files. It is based on the Small Change approach to community development as championed by CENDEP's Emeritus Professor and programme co-founder, Nabeel Hamdi. 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.

The conference fee is £30. Download a booking form using the link below.