As we reach the home straight, Fun Palaces Co-Directors Stella Duffy and Sarah-Jane Rawlings on how Fun Palace Makers are changing the world.

Often, when we set out to change the world, the world we’re trying to change is the one over there – the politicians, the councillors, the governors, the bosses. Those who are really in charge, those who are pulling the reins, those we don’t know, but we know if only they’d listen to us, we could make them see sense, we could persuade them of the right thing to do and the right way to do it. Often, when we set out to change the world, we’re really setting out to change other people.  In creating the Fun Palaces campaign, what we’ve seen is how Fun Palaces makers are changing – are allowing themselves to change – as they make Fun Palaces.

There are dozens of stories, and they’re coming in from all over the country, about people setting out to make a difference, in their local community, by making a Fun Palace, and finding out that the difference they’re also making is in themselves – changing the world begins at home.

The Fun Palace maker who emailed us the other day to say, “As well as having great collaborators it’s so nice to have made some new friends through all this.”

The one who tweeted, “It’s been a great motivator for our group.”

The volunteer maker who says of her local Fun Palace, “I didn’t expect to feel so close to my community, it’s helped me know I have a community.”

The maker who said, “I have never felt before that I could walk into a shop and ask for sponsorship for our Fun Palace – and then they say yes!”

The maker, not a British national, who said, “I have had conversations with my neighbours that I have never had since I moved to Britain.”

The arts producer from a manor venue who, having met a dozen or more volunteer Fun Palaces makers, said, “I almost feel guilty, they’re doing so much work, as volunteers, and this is my job – and they’re doing it so well!”

The other makers who have ‘proper jobs’ as producers or arts makers, who look to the volunteer-led Fun Palaces and note how much they can learn from how the volunteers are working.

The Fun Palace maker who attended her first ever local council meeting in order to ask for some local council funding – she stood up, made a speech and got the funding. She also listened to an hour or longer discussion about the parking problems in their town and it’s possible that their Fun Palace may now have dreamed up a locally-led way to find a solution.

The Fun Palace maker who said that since she moved to a new town she had only met people her own age, all of them other young mothers, but since getting involved with making a Fun Palace she’d met people of all ages, and said how much she was enjoying the company of the women in their 60s and 70s, new neighbours with different concerns and different interests.

The Fun Palace maker who said, “I had no trouble getting scientists to come and make our Fun Palace – I asked my scientist friend, now we have 20 or 30 of them.”

The dozens of people, all over the country, who are ALREADY making Fun Palaces sort of work, already making accessible, engaged, community-involved work, and who get to share their work more widely, more publicly, with more support, because they’re joining in with us.

All of these people are making a Fun Palace because they said yes to the call to join in, to make something with and for their community, something that says arts and sciences are for all the people, not just some of us. That says public engagement needs to come from within the community, not the outside. They said yes to the invitation to perhaps do more than they usually do in their community, to perhaps do more, as artists and as scientists, around their local community. They said yes because it sounded like fun (often useful), because we said (and meant) that anything you want to do is fine with us, as long as it’s within the guidelines, because we said (and meant) it’s YOUR community, you know it better than we do, you know what it wants better than we do.

And it’s made a difference for us too. It’s changed our worlds too.

Stella: I’ve always cared about community and arts access for all, I just didn’t know a way to make it possible. In the Fun Palaces core team, we are well aware that this is a way, not THE way – one more way to make a difference, a way that works for us. I have never thought I wanted to work in an office – to be, in effect, a producer – but right now, that’s what I’m doing. I’m in an office, with a brilliant team, and it’s working. It’s very much like making a show, it’s not that different after all. I love what we are doing, I love that it’s touching people. It’s made me personally braver in so many ways. Braver about technology and digital work (the scary things I’ve done with our website back end!). Sarah-Jane’s strength and knowledge has made me way braver about budgeting and funding than I’ve ever been – for a good ten years of my career I just didn’t apply for funding, ever, because I couldn’t bear all that effort and then getting turned down. (I made work on the back of getting paid for the last piece of work, I made work by funding myself retrospectively, when I sold something I’d made and then put that money to the next project, instead of getting help to fund the making of anything new. It worked, some of the time, but it’s definitely the harder way round.) I have learned so much about my own work and the work I care about. I have reminded myself how amazing strangers can be, how they get it too. I have reminded myself that in all those times when I felt alone and unsure, there were these amazing people out there in the rest of the country, the rest of the world, who also wanted to make a difference from where they were, also wanted to change the world. I just didn’t know them yet.

Sarah-Jane: Changing the world, really changing the world is always going to be incremental (unless an act of God is involved).  And by incremental I mean slow, small steps towards things being different – Fun Palaces is the opportunity for everyone to take some of these steps together (towards a more cohesive, creative, skill sharing community), but in their own way. And that to me is what is at the core of this campaign – Fun Palaces HQ can hold everything together and provide impetus and support but what matters is each person taking it up and making it their own and then telling someone else about it – and that is brave and that very act of being brave is life changing. This maybe trivialises it a little, but for me it harks back to all the impro I have ever been part of and to all the best ensemble working: everyone’s individuality and spirit has to be recognized and celebrated; the only acceptable answer is yes; each individual has a responsibility to the group and at the centre of it all – there should be fun. Joan would love it – the metaphor for this whole campaign is how the best theatre is made. For this campaign is not ours, it’s everybody’s – it has to be everybody’s if it is going to work and it can only be everybody’s if we all take responsibility for it, and it is that very act of taking responsibility which is the first step. When Stella and I met to talk through this kernel of an idea – to make Fun Palaces happen across the country – we didn’t quite realise how it would very quickly become so much a part of who we are. In a tiny independent French tea shop in Soho, Maison Bertaux, Stella spilt coffee (edit from Stella – because I was so nervous that Sarah-Jane would say no and I’d have to do it all alone!), delicate china was broken – we talked and talked and realized that what we were talking about was something much more fundamental than a one-off festival of fun – we were talking about well-being and friendship and untapped creativity everywhere and Fun Palaces was just the trigger to get it all going. And I said yes, without knowing really what we had, yes I will partner with you and follow an ideal, and that was my step, my moment of bravery. And that moment of yes – is changing me and the way I live my life – I’m learning to take risks, to enjoy not knowing, to boldly believe in what I believe in and not feel foolish. I’m realising it is OK (and actually rather exhilarating) to believe in a revolution because actually lots of other people do too.

In the Fun Palaces office, we don’t say we’re doing something new, we say we’re unearthing what very many people are already doing and have been doing for years – making arts and sciences accessible to all, making work by, for and with community, making it local, making it where we are, for everyone. What we’re doing that IS different, is sharing it on a national level, simultaneously.

So, how are Fun Palaces makers changing the world?

By making their Fun Palace where they live.

By working with and for their own community.

By stepping up and having the guts to speak out at home.

By risking running an event RIGHT WHERE THEY LIVE – and by allowing themselves, ourselves, to change.

There is no revolution unless it also happens at home.

There is no revolution unless it starts with us.

Stella Duffy and Sarah-Jane Rawlings, Co-Directors, Fun Palaces