Our Purpose
Fun Palaces is a year-round campaign with an annual Weekend of Celebration.
Our year-round campaign works towards a world where everyone has a say in what counts as culture, where it happens, who makes it, and who experiences it.
Part of our campaign includes events called Fun Palaces, which are made by you. You could host fun, free and locally-led activities with your friends or neighbours to share your secret skills. If you’re a public venue, you could hand over your space to your community so they can make a Fun Palace themselves.
On the first weekend of October every year, we support the Weekend of Celebration. This is when thousands of Fun Palace Makers across the UK and beyond run their Fun Palaces on a single weekend and we celebrate similar events happening throughout the year. The weekend is a chance to shout about the brilliance in all communities in a united voice.
Our workshops and our Ambassadors Programme support communities to create by and for themselves; developing local networks, linking individuals and organisations, encouraging venues to co-create with local people, and helping small groups to shout about their value as grassroots community activists.
VISION
A world where communities have an active role in culture, where everyone’s brilliance is recognised and valued, where people create, connect, learn and have fun, where communities have what they need to be active and equal leaders and collaborators.
AIMS
- To change how we all see and fund culture so that the culture made and enjoyed by all communities counts.
- To make the most of all talents, spaces, local and national strengths, and assets, so that we live in a culturally richer and fairer world.
- To encourage creativity and connection so that we have vibrant, confident, and strong communities.
OBJECTIVES
- To celebrate, value, and amplify the culture in local communities through year-round campaign work and our Weekend of Celebration.
- To support venues and institutions to hand over decision-making to communities and to share resources (e.g. spaces and funds) for community and sector benefit. We achieve this through working with hosts, ambassadors and venues for community-led takeovers and supporting with workshops and toolkits.
- To connect people, venues, and places to share learning and collaborate through our ambassadors programme, workshops, networking opportunities, and action research.
- To inspire, equip and support communities to create, explore, and take the lead through our case studies, toolkits, workshops, and network.
Background
In the early 1960s, Joan Littlewood and architect Cedric Price conceived the original, never-built Fun Palace as a ‘laboratory of fun’ and ‘a university of the streets’. It was to be a local building, home to the arts and sciences, open and welcoming to all. For many reasons, it wasn’t possible in 1961 and the Fun Palace building they envisioned never came to fruition, there’s more detail here.
However, the concept of a space welcoming and open to all, led by and for local people, remained a great idea and since 2013 we have developed the Weekend of Celebration and the ongoing Fun Palaces campaign. Co-founder Stella Duffy wrote this piece explaining how the campaign started.