Fun Palaces believes that not only should everyone have access to culture, but that everyone should have access to create culture, not just consume it. Further, we believe that the best people to create culture in and for a community are the people of that community themselves.

We started in 2013, with Sarah-Jane and Stella working from their kitchen tables, with a dream of people and places joining in, community-led creativity and tiny revolutions of connection. Sarah-Jane and Stella both left Fun Palaces after 8 years, in 2021. Kirsty Lothian and Makala Cheung are now the co-directors.

Since then there have been a total of 2100 Fun Palaces in 16 nations, with over half a million people taking part.

If you visit a Fun Palace locally you probably won’t see the national and international effort, and after all, the local/community impact is what we’re after, so here’s what we do in addition to running our workshops, supporting our Ambassadors Programme, and making the weekend happen. Makala and Kirsty are part-time:

Kirsty does the big budgets, the strategy and the hard thinking about where we need to be in the future and how we’re going to get there.

Makala takes all of your data and turns it into our annual evaluation, so we know what we’re doing well, what we can do better, and what to concentrate on next.

Between us we also look after all of the Makers, do the admin, update the website, gather data from Makers and Fun Palaces, support the Ambassadors, run workshops and work to make the campaign ever more inclusive.

We need your help.
We are committed to ensuring that anyone anywhere can create a local Fun Palace. We are committed to keeping our workshops pay-what-you-can – which sometimes means free.

We have dreams of supporting a Maker Network, more workshops, further decentralisation and many more Ambassadors.

We are hugely grateful for any donation, whether it helps us pay for a train ticket to support  Fun Palace with some one-to-one advice, print the posters and flyers we send free to Fun Palaces, or enable us to offer more local workshops, it all helps.

Thank you,

Kirsty and Makala