You’ve decided to make a Fun Palace. You have FIVE WEEKS to do it – here’s how:

1. Find someone/a group of people to do it with you.
Start with who you already know. Friends, neighbours, family, colleagues. Fun Palaces are made by individuals, groups of two or ten or one hundred. It really doesn’t matter. Tap into people’s secret skills and ask them to share them. Someone who always makes birthday cards? A drummer? Someone who knows how to keep plants alive, identify birds or tell you some local history?  They don’t need to be an expert, as long as they can share it with someone else, that’s great.

By share, we mean anything from a twenty-minute workshop to a five-minute demo. But Fun Palaces are about being hands-on, not just watching – so it people can have a go, that’s the dream. 

2. Find a location
Fun Palaces happen in all kinds of places: libraries, shops, schools, churches, parks, swimming pools, gyms, community centres, fields, forests … and people’s homes. Check out the map.

To make a Fun Palace in a public location, ask whoever is in charge if they’d like a community-led event made by and for local people. Show them our short film and this  brilliant brief evaluation about what Fun Palaces achieve.

It’s also fine to make a Fun Palace in your front garden, in the paved area between the blocks in your estate, or any other place that is open to the public.

3. Sign up
This gets you on our map and means we know you’re joining in, and lets other local people know too. If we don’t know you’re making a Fun Palace, we can’t help. 

4. Share it
Once you’re on the map, we’ll send you posters to advertise your Fun Palace, helping you spread the word locally and nationally. We also have loads of info in the toolkit, along with the design for a cheap outdoor banner and a template risk assessment. Here’s our  Publicity Toolkit including a template press release  and  template letter to your MP or councillor to invite them along.

5. Do it
Things will go wrong, people will fail to turn up, it will be messy and probably noisy. That’s okay. The point of Fun Palaces is to create together, to have chats over a cup of tea, to understand our neighbours a bit better. If 1000 people take part and create a phenomenal local social movement – great. If no one comes, but you and the neighbours get to know each other through making your Fun Palace – also great. You’ve heard other people say the journey is what matters, not the destination. We mean it.

Photos L-R: Festival of Radical Fun at the Museum of London 07/10/2017. Photograph of Juneau Projects. Fun Palaces at Lancaster Library. Photograph by Jamie Lee Buttershaw. Photograph at Greenwich Museums Fun Palace.