We invited the speakers and the audience from The Maverick City to join us for a day of community building at WECC and during the weeks before we asked local businesses to donate pallets that we could strip and use to make furniture on site.

Our team was very international as it included most of our speakers and during the day a few of the audience joined in too.  We had people from Chicago, Rio, Latvia, Italy, The Netherlands and Liverpool involved.

It was one of the most moving projects we have worked on – at some point during the day everyone cried, with humility, compassion and joy.  This was about so many things…….individuals making new connections, learning new skills they could take back to their own communities, leaving a gift for a community that felt neglected and the rebirth of ambition and hope.

Read a couple of accounts of the day from participants below and have a look at some of our favourite photos.

Community Build project reflections by Chiara Organtini

On the Saturday we packed all our energy and headed as early birds to West Everton, where We Make Places recently opened a workshop to support their brand new Urban Workbench  project led Angelo Madonna, a multidisciplinary artist. This project  is a learning hub for communities and people  that can gain the skills and ability to reshape their own spaces by learning DIY skills and collaborative attitudes.

As I directly experienced, Urban Workbench is a way to empower people, enable the grass roots process of urban regeneration or the reclaiming of spaces by changing peoples thoughts, skills and the way they see things and relate to one another.

We spent the day at West Everton Community Council with a group of community members and stakeholders to make outdoor benches for their courtyard so to make the space alive, visible and enjoyable for elderly people, children and others visiting the centre.  West Everton Community Council is a resident led organisation that advocates for residents to ensure they have a voice at all levels, also identifying and responding to all issues that directly affect the  whole community.

While there, the community members told us about the story of the place and the recent fire that damaged part of the building and the story of Everton also in regards to the new project  in Great Homer Street (Project Jennifer) that will create a new hub of activity in North Liverpool and will act as a catalyst for the wider redevelopment of this part of the city. Their role as a community organisation is to ensure a balanced regeneration process where  bricks are not more important that people and where quality of life and community relationships are equally taken into account.

I felt enriched by the idea we could  give a small contribution to the improvement of the future of this valuable organisation.

The whole day was a collective creative workshop, teaming up according to tasks and projects in-between excitement, release of energies and ideas, frustrations also for not being perfectly able to do all the work. This doing affected of course also my thinking and I realized the importance of creating infrastructure for participation, leaving spaces for the people, and giving tools to people to make their own spaces.

During the day I found my self hammering, sawing, breaking pallets: I wanted to achieve results without knowing how, I wanted to get the final result without observing listening to the shape of the object the material and the group as I was so anxious to make a big contribution to this community centre.

Then I started to be more in flow, streaming with the group, listening and observing what was around me and in the object we were creating. This adjustable navigation is indeed one of the principles I try to apply in my daily work in project management and this level of openness is crucial to inject oxygen and keep our action alive and in tune with the surrounding situation. Making together is really a way to reset minds and bodies, shifting the focus on a common goal, sharing reponsibilities and forgetting our egos and assumptions: we entered a land where collaboration, creativity and reactions where the keywords and a perfect receipt for new ideas.

This afternoon, besides giving new benches to the community,  above all gave me confidence and changed how I think about me and the possibility I have to impact being a reflective practicionner, acting thinking and adjusting the navigation beyond the simple planning.

Afterwards

My experience in Liverpool still resonates in my body and in my head, and is more a patchwork of diverse areas of the city that speak about a complexity that merge opposites stories from gentrification to regeneration. But above all I still have a gallery of voices and faces that feed me with inspirations: Kate makes magic happen, she creates a perfect mix of people and then let the process goes.

There is a precise moment I remember: when I was taught how to use a handsaw; in that movement I felt like I was playing the violin, not as gently as Tiago does but in the effort of learning: in that moment it was like I was cutting away my fears and the limits I imposed myself.

Some people are like stars: what keeps them alive is the balance between the energy they get while releasing their own light.