community projects

Arts Award Aspiration Workshops

We have received funding from the RJB Fund through Suffolk Community Foundation, which will enable us to host high quality arts courses for the children of families engaged with Ipswich Job Centre and for Suffolk Young Carers, a group within Suffolk Family Carers. The workshops will take place in our new Dove Street Studio, which has been specifically designed in consultation with Ipswich Job Centre to provide a safe and consistent space for vulnerable families, particularly those with neorodiverse members. The two courses will take place during the summer holidays, when families often struggle to afford activities for their children to attend. The courses will teach a range of 2D and 3D art techniques, based on feedback from participating young people about what they would like to learn. The courses will enable the children to build up a portfolio of work which RPS can submit to the Arts Award, enabling the children to gain a formal qualification. We believe that participation in high-quality formal arts training has the potential to encourage aspiration and transform young people’s self-confidence and understanding of their own potential. We are so excited to deliver this project to our young artists!

Creative Literacy with Stoke Library

We recently received generous funding from Suffolk County Council Councillor Rob Bridgeman, which enabled us to deliver workshops at Stoke Library to children from Hillside Primary School. The children were selected by their teachers - for one workshop the participants were all gifted and talented in art or literacy, but do not necessarily have the resources at home to pursue their passions, and for the other workshop the participants were all pupils who are quietly hardworking and sometimes overlooked for opportunities. The workshops were all book-based - creating dioramas, writing alternate endings to our favourite books and making origami bookmarks! The chidren really engaged with the narratives - the stories complemented and expanded their creativity.

Hillside Primary gave us the following feedback: ‘I just want to say a big thank you [for the workshops]. The children absolutely loved them and have been saying they want to do them everyday! To see them being so creative and engaged with books was just wonderful, and you could really see the passion and enthusiasm shining through. You and the team have really inspired them to be artists’.

Social Action Workshops

In April, with funding from Suffolk County Council, we hosted a series of social action workshops at The Hold, Suffolk Archives led by our amazing team of historians, activists and artists. The participants were all part of the HAF programme, which supports children and families in the school holidays and provides healthy food and enriching activities to free school meal eligible children. The workshops included a lesson entitled ‘what is activism’ exploring the role of activism in history and progression of society. The lesson was followed by two creative sessions, one involving the design of a placard and creation of a slogan around a theme which each participant identified as of personal importance, and the section involving a Leake Street style free-hand and stencilled graffiti mural. The finale involved a procession out through The Hold to the front of the building and an oppotunity for the young people to make a speech about their chosen cause. We love the way that creativity and social action can pull together to give our young artists the confidence to make their thoughts and opinions known!

South Street Kids ‘Respect Our Town’ Parade

In April 2022, we delivered a workshop to the young people of South Street Kids, a weekly project run by Ipswich Community Media with Saturday morning sessions for young people; gaining skills, confidence and developing a strong voice in their community. The workshop involved making banners, signs and shakers with the young people, to celebrate the part of town they live in, which often is misperceived or denigrated. The materials were used in the Norwich Road Celebration Parade, as the young people marched from Eastern Angles to the Hive with chants of 'Respect Our Town' and hand drumming. The young people were especially excited to interview the Mayor of Ipswich who joined them for the event; they listened to her attentively and responded to all the questions that she asked about their community. One of the young people from South Street Kids said about the day, ‘I liked the parade because it made my day and also everyone else's day!’ At RPS, we believe that whole community access to the arts has the power to build confidence and teach self-expression for our young people.

Rock Paper Grow

In summer 2021, we delivered a series of outdoor workshops which will enabled participants to learn about local wildlife, get creative in nature and benefit from time spent outdoors. One of our fantastic tutors, Ellie, undertook a therapeutic horticulture course with Thrive, a gardening for health charity. The workshops were delivered onsite at a local allotment allotment in central Ipswich and at St Mary’s Primary School; workshop participants will transform each raised bed into a sanctuary for different local wildlife, such as bees, bugs, bats and deer. We received funding for this project from Suffolk Community Foundation, which enabled us to offer the workshops free of charge to young people living locally without easy access to a garden.

At the end of 2021, we received funding from Suffolk County Council to run six free outdoor workshops in Spring 2022. These took place at various outdoor locations in our community: the Emmaus hub at The Dales, the gardens at Rushmere Hall Primary School, and in Holywells Park. These Workshops engaged the full breadth of our community and offered families without gardens the wellbeing benefits of spending time in nature.

Rock Paper Shine

We have created a mental health journal for young people in partnership with Suffolk Mind. The journal includes activities and creative journaling tasks to support wellbeing and provide strategies for self-care and mood regulation. The activities have been developed in consultation with Early Minds specialists at Suffolk Mind and we have taken valuable feedback through focus groups at a number of local schools. We are distributing the journals to local partner organisations such as Ipswich Job Centre and to local Primary Schools in areas of high deprivation. The journal can also be purchased on our website, and proceeds will support our further development of the journal.

A quote on the journal from Helen Baggett, Associate director, Gecko and Lead practitioner, New Wolsey Youth Theatre: ‘RPShine is a new, important tool to support young minds. Beautifully made and perfectly pitched - it is accessible, rigorous and imaginative. It will be such a useful resource to bring about greater understanding and awareness of mental health through creativity and conversation. Once again, the team at RPS have used their skill, experience and wonderful artistic vision to enrich the creative and emotional lives of our young community.’

In January 2022, we were awarded funding from East of England Coop as part of their Community Cares fund, which will enable us to deliver a series of workshops in community hubs and schools during which we will work through activities based on the journal with the participants and teach them to use the journal to support healthy mental wellbeing.

Identity Mural Project

This project started in 2021 working with St Helen’s Primary School, their Parent-Teacher Association and the Ipswich Borough Council, Rock Paper Scissors delivered a series of mural workshops with the previous year 6 class. The entrance to St Helen’s school is an alleyway running between Spring Road and Woodbridge Road. Over three tutored sessions, the children of year 6 transformed part of the alley way into a visual celebration of their individual and diverse identities. In the past, difficulty with antisocial behaviour in the alleyway has caused teachers and parents at St Helens concern about children and families using the alleyway to access the school. Street art and murals have increasingly been identified as a method of lowering rates of antisocial behaviour. This phenomenon has been discussed in an article by the BBC about graffiti in east Hull and an article about a very similar project involving school children in Burnham. At Rock Paper Scissors, we feel passionately that art and creative education can be used to tackle many of the difficulties faced by our community, and we are excited to be a part of positive change for St Helen’s Primary School.

Siobhan, a parent of a pupil at St Helen’s Primary School, said: ‘The mural was a really positive project at the end of a difficult year due to Covid-19. The children loved taking part and the results look fantastic. It really gave the children a sense of achievement. The mural adds a sense of pride in the area and school as part of the community. It used art in an unusual space to reclaim the alley and remind people there is a school in the area and to be respectful’.

Due to the success of this project we currently have three more mural projects happening in 2022 at St Matthews Primary School, Hillside Primary School and another mural at St Helen’s! We are also working with other schools to put together funding bids for mural projects.

A Collaboration with Art for Cure

Each year, Art for Cure hosts an art and sculpture exhibition and auction to raise money for breast cancer research. This year, because of pandemic-related restrictions, Art for Cure took place as an online auction and a series of online master classes. We were thrilled to receive a request from Thea Cutting, who runs Gallery Thea in Southwold, to host one of the master classes. Our class was aimed at families, each of whom paid £25 to participate in an online workshop inspired by Camille Walala, who is a Portuguese contemporary street artist. We elected 100% of the ticket funds to go to Art for Cure and were thrilled to be a part of this unique fundraising event. We received great feedback from the families who bought tickets, reflecting that it was a unique and interactive experience, with an unexpected mindfulness benefit. We hope to make our master class a recurring part of the annual Art for Cure event.

Masks with the local Roma Community

In early 2021, Colchester and Ipswich Museums asked us to create a mask kit and short educational video inspired by the museums’ mask collection. This project was to support our local Roma community in communicating the importance of mask wearing during the pandemic. The Roma community have suffered disproportionately during the pandemic, and this is thought to be caused by the fact that the Romani language is a purely spoken language and does not have a written form, so government information about Covid-19 protocols such as mask wearing was not sufficiently conveyed to the Roma community. We created 100 kits, each of which included the materials necessary to decorate a triple-ply fabric mask and a visual printed guide. The recipients also have access to a social media group with an instructional video, as this was identified as an important mode of communication for the Roma community.

Pride in Suffolk Workshops with The Hold 

We recently developed a series of online workshops in partnership with The Hold, Suffolk's brand new archive centre on Ipswich Waterfront. The Hold’s exhibition entitled ‘Suffolk’s Past: Sharing LGBTQ+ stories past and present’ formed the inspiration for our workshop. Each workshop featured a different member of the Suffolk LGBTQI+ community who has played an important role in local history. The workshops also explored themes around personal identity, allyship and historical erasure of marginalised groups. Creative activities included each child creating their own identity flag based on the progress flag and a representative portrait of each featured LGBTQI+ hero, exploring their impact on the world through visual imagery. Happily, we were able to offer these workshops for free to our partner organisations and local schools, thanks to funding from Suffolk Community Foundation. A parent described our workshops as ‘perfectly pitched language for this age group with positive dialogue and interesting people to learn about… a great opportunity to ask any questions and share knowledge about the LGBTQIA+ community’. A child who attended the workshops said, ‘I will show my friends my flag and tell them about this workshop’, whilst another explained ‘this workshop has helped me to understand more about the different identities which the LGBTQ+ communities support’.

Suffolk County Council Spring Zine

In early 2021, we worked with the Localities and Partnerships Team at Suffolk County Council to design, print and distribute a Spring Zine. We developed a full colour printed journal, including activities which could be done at home with just a pen and pencil. Because we want our activities to be accessible and sustainable, we always think very carefully about the materials each activity requires. This was a focus for the Spring Zine. The activities were designed to develop creative writing and storytelling skills through visual and written journaling. Sixteen thousand copies of the Spring Zine were printed and delivered to all primary school aged children in Suffolk in receipt of free school meals. You can download and complete the Spring Zine activities on the Suffolk County Council website.

Rock Paper Stories 

These creative literacy packs each included a book, appropriate to the age of the recipients, who were between 4 and 12 years of age. Titles included ‘Look up!’ by Nathan Bryan and illustrated by Dapo Adeola, ‘Wild Weather’ by Emily Bone and illustrated by Bao Luu, and ‘Do You Love Bugs?’ by Matt Robertson. The books were accompanied by the art supplies necessary to carry out set activities, including string, sticks, ink, polystyrene balls, paint brushes, plasticine in three colours, writing and drawing materials and washi tape. Each kit was packaged in a recyclable paper bag. We were careful in selecting materials which were high quality and would last beyond the planned activities in the kit. The activities were set out in an illustrated booklet, and each book had activities associated with its content. For example, a weather machine for Wild Weather, a hero postcard for ‘Look Up!’ and butterfly wings for ‘Do You Love Bugs?’ Since pandemic-related school closures began in March 2020, there has been concern that many young people will be facing huge challenges in accessing education provision at home. We created 220 packs, with funding from Suffolk Community Foundation. Our partner organisation, Volunteering Matters, distributed the packs to organisations including BME Food Banks, Suffolk Refugee Support, East Coast ADHD Service and More than Mums. 

Summer In a Box 

We received a grant from Suffolk County Council, which funded the creation and delivery of 1765 creative kits. We spent a week at Volunteering Matters packing our kits. Each kit contained: water colours, brush, pencil, fine liner, washi tape, string, stickers, plasticine, coloured, glue, paper and a sketch book, all in a zip-up reusable pouch. The reusable pouch enabled us to minimise waste and boost sustainability; this is one of the areas in which the Summer in a Box kits improved on the sustainability of the Rock Paper Stories Kits. The selection of the materials is a critical stage in all of our projects as it is the area where sustainability can best be promoted. However, for our creative kits it is also where we were able to promote accessibility. We ensured that absolutely everything necessary for the activities was included in the kit, making assumptions about materials or adult supervision being available. The activities included illustration, 3D model making, a seascape diorama, self-portrait work, lolly-pop stick creatures, and a number of drawing prompts. The focus on the kit was on self-selection of activities, to ensure the process of completing the activities felt empowering, rather than being a task to tick off. The kits were delivered to schools and given out just before the summer holiday. Feedback reflected that families appreciated the opportunity to do creative activities at home and many children were thrilled to discover that they were allowed to keep all the materials and book.

Suffolk Young Carers at Ipswich Museum 

In early 2020, we were asked by Ipswich Museum to run a series of creative workshops within the museum for children supported by Suffolk Young Carers. The sessions occurred in the education room of the museum and we really made the most of the exhibits - each session began looking at a particular exhibit or area of the museum and sketching or mark making based on our observations, before returning to the education room to develop the project. Each workshop was designed to involve quiet, focussed tasks with freedom for the young carers to select their own activities and style of working, as for many of them it was the only hour they had to themselves in the entire week. Activities included tissue paper dip dying, close up drawings of pattern and colour in the museum, articulated birds and 3D sculpture. We were thrilled to be able to nurture a relaxed atmosphere. We adjusted many of the tasks to suit the fact that the young carers were independently-minded and able to work on activities with minimal supervision. Our role was very much to provide materials and creative prompts - and the young carers took it from there.