Engagement

Our community engagement programme aims to expand poetry beyond the “usual places” and “usual suspects”, making it a fun and inspiring element of people’s everyday lives. To do this in 2024, we are building on existing professional relationships and connections, supporting and facilitating our partner organisations in achieving their aims through our collaboration.

This year will see us working with Open Book and SCOREScotland.

SCOREscotland work with partners to address the causes of racism and to provide support to families and young people who struggle with its effects. Their goal is to strengthen communities and to enable people to take an active and full part in community life.

We are delighted to be partnering with them for the second year. This year we will also be working in collaboration with the Tinderbox Collective and with poet and rapper, Bee Asha, to offer a series of workshops to empower young people and offer them the opportunity to express themselves through poetry.

Part of the Disrupting the Narrative theme and the Edinburgh 900 Programme, this will result in a performance at the 2024 festival where Bee Asha and Tinderbox will support the young people to share their words set to music as they explore what it’s like to grow up as a young person of colour in Edinburgh today.

We continue our partnership with Open Book, enabling us to work with the communities they support from Shetland to Stranraer and Portree to Perth with people from many different walks of life. This year we support their writers to share an in-person presentation of their latest pamphlet, No Such Thing as Lost. These new collaborative poems, created over the past year, touch on protest, postcards, heritage and hope.

We are so proud to work with Open Book and the people they support. Their incredible groups offer over 1200 shared reading and creative writing sessions each year, for public participants across Scotland and a broad range of diverse communities including New Scots, LGBTQ+ communities, older people, people experiencing a range of health conditions and people in prison.

We’ve been privileged to work with great collaborators and communities since our inception in 2021. Information about our previous projects can be found here.