The Big Lottery Fund invests in CoLab Dudley

We have good news. The Big Lottery Fund has agreed to invest in our Colab Dudley work.

This means that we can continue to build a platform of trust in the town, one which makes it easier for people to grow and maintain fruitful relationships.

The money will help us over the next three years: in part with resources, but also it gives us a boost to know that Big Lottery appreciates this way of working.

We’ve been talking to the Lottery team for nearly a year. The funding is not for us to provide services but to support the skills, approach, ideas, space and lab team that help connect people in Dudley.

Emergent Cultures

For the last two years, CoLab Dudley has been experimenting and making that case to build this platform, starting in the town centre. Together we make it easier for people in Dudley to create, share, make, do and learn things together.

This means that at the heart of our work is relationships. The friendships formed when care is taken to welcome everyone. The pleasure people experience in passing on knowledge and practical skills to others. Connections between local creatives who make, perform, exhibit and trade spaces which are open to all. Support and encouragement shared between emerging and established social entrepreneurs making change in the same town. Our powerful relationships with place and the natural world. A collective sense of possibility nurtured when we turn ideas into experiments and learn together.

In the last year CoLab has helped with: Trade Schools, Crafternoons, Make Fest, Do Fest, Edible Dudley and many other ways in which people come together.

It takes time, effort, ideas and persistence and helps people shape their lives in many ways

These are some of the elements of the platform:

Place and Spaces: We create access to all kinds of spaces and support for people to connect, collaborate, test and incubate activities, projects and social enterprises. Our focus is currently on the High Street and St Thomas Quarter.

Inspiration and innovation: The lab draws on and shares inspiration from anywhere where people are collaborating and sharing to create social good. The inspiration acts as a curio and a catalyst for people who want to try something new or change things around them and their family or friends.

Design and Detectorism: The platform approach brings together two very conscious ways or working: we use simple design methods to help people explore what they want to do and test and experiment with their ideas. We also encourage people to actively watch what is happening, record it and learn from that, a method we call this detectorism.

Network Weaving: The spaces and the things people do together help create relationships. In the lab we also deliberately think about networks of people and consciously connect people up.

Besides the Big Lottery Fund, the partners working on this include:

Dudley CVS: a local infrastructure body with a strong commitment to cultivate connected, resilient communities.

“The CoLab team has been experimenting with different ways to help people in Dudley flourish, one that is based on good relationships more than services to fix or support. We have made developing this work a priority for Dudley CVS this year, so it’s really encouraging to see the Big Lottery Fund choose to join in and support CoLab Dudley.” Lorna Prescott, Dudley CVS

Gather Dudley CIC: Started with a vision that a spark of positivity in the middle of Dudley could begin to make flames of optimism glow in every part of its community. Gather is a High St coffee shop and cafe with an open and honest welcome and a gentle invitation to be curious and take part in a growing community of doers. Those who want to see Dudley thrive, those who want to meet like-minded individuals, those who want to create, those who want to be a part of, and a reason for, a change in our local environment and way of thinking.

“We want to achieve a vibrant exciting regenerated town and create it from the grassroots up. Doing it that way makes it people led, and that means we can keep going. You look at Dudley and it can just look like an ordinary humdrum town, but when you have something like Gather and you see the variety of people coming in, you see the heart of people, you feel their energy, you feel the excitement that they want to make things happen.” Stu Homer and Loraine Stockton, Gather Dudley CIC

Unltd: is the Foundation for Social Entrepreneurs, a UK registered charity set up in 2002. Their job is to reach out and unleash the energies of social entrepreneurs who can transform the world in which they live.

I want the welcome you get in Gather to be amplified across the town centre. I want people to just think they can do stuff to change things, that they’ve got some hope and opportunity to do something about it rather than just complaining. This funding partly invests in the platform that supports people to take positive action, whether that’s through bringing people together or developing more social enterprises in Dudley. Adam Hall, UnLtd

There is a lab team drawn in part from the partners and in part from other people with experience in our work.