What We Mean by Social Change
For this blog post, our Arts and Wellbeing Director, Beccy, has taken to the metaphorical typewriter to put together some thoughts on what we mean by social change and how we cascade that out to you, our community, through our work.
Our Roots in Social Change
When we wrote our new vision, mission and values in September 2024, including a sentence about how everything we do at St Margaret’s House is ‘rooted in social change’ felt completely natural. Not one of us questioned it. It’s part of the fabric of SMH: the DNA of the building and its founding principles. The pioneering settlement houses set up in the 1880s, of which SMH is one of four in Tower Hamlets, were created around work campaigning for social justice and equality. And that spirit endures more than 135 years later.
Defining What We Mean
But less than 12 months after the new leadership team at SMH adopted our refreshed guiding principles and statements, we came back together as a full staff and trustee team to really interrogate what we meant by ‘social change’. It’s not enough for us to just say we do it, we need to be able to articulate how we do it. And having a definition guides our programming decisions as well as how we work alongside our community to ensure the grassroots groups and arts, wellbeing and community practices we showcase, be that our tenants or those who hire our spaces for their own work, are united to achieve these common goals.
So, what was it that we came up with? Well…
We aim to create social change by working towards a more inclusive and sustainable society.
We stand for inclusion: breaking down barriers, encouraging acceptance and tackling injustice.
We stand for sustainability: advocating for the wellness of people and planet, empowering actions in others and preventing negative impact.
Our hope is that this resonates with everyone in some small or significant way and that there’s a palpable sense of that ethos in everything you see as you walk around the building or as you pick a new activity to get involved in from our What’s On. But we also hope you can see it in the approach we take to engaging with the many different groups who find a home in our spaces and in the role we play in the wider industries of which we are a part.
So, how does this manifest in everyday practices and longer-term work at SMH? Let me explain...
Repair as Resistance
I'll start with an example: just last month, as part of Second Hand September, we hosted an exhibition that celebrated the act of repair as resistance. We acknowledged that in a world of fast fashion, of consumerism and built-in obsolescence and throw-away culture, our commitment to repair and to pre-loved fashion through Ayoka is vital for the future of the planet. We run repair cafes to help people learn how to fix their household items and clothes, offer affordable and free ways for people to practise art and crafts in collective experiences. And through all of this, we are going against the grain. We’re showing how the wellness of people and planet really do go hand-in-hand. And we’re empowering others, too. Whether you’re inspired to buy second hand for the first time when you realise we have a charity shop, or you’re encouraged to bring your reusable cup for your takeaway coffee from The Gallery Cafe or to try a vegan dish for the first time or regularly: we hope that there are small, gentle nudges from the way SMH and our Ayoka charity shop and Gallery Cafe interact with one another, that can in turn nudge you into positive habits that can prevent negative impact.
Celebrating Sustainable Fashion
We try to link the experiences we offer too. For instance, we followed up our Second Hand September campaign with our first ever Ayoka Second Hand Fashion Show. It was a joyful celebration of our community who took to the catwalk as models, showing off pre-loved and upcycled clothes as an affordable wardrobe that feels more creative and more connected to the community as a whole and ourselves on a personal level. This is inclusion, this is social change, this is wellness of people and planet – and all tied by the thread of collective making, getting involved and experiencing together.
Community Gardening and Environmental Care
You may also have noticed that we now have a Social Gardening Club opportunity. We know how lucky we are to have a beautiful garden right in the middle of all of our buildings at St Margaret’s House (and the heart of the urban landscape of Bethnal Green) and we make it available for cafe customers every day (even when it’s a bit grey and dreary outside). But just offering the chance to sit within the garden isn’t enough for us. We know that most people in Tower Hamlets don’t have access to a garden of their own and would really benefit from the wellbeing potential of some time spent gardening. So we opened the care of our garden up to our community, in a collective activity that brings people together, sparks joy and improves people’s health and wellbeing whilst also helping us care for something together. We've even taken this beyond our garden walls by becoming a Clean Up Hub so you can borrow litter-picking equipment to clean up your local area and the streets around SMH. We believe that community acts of volunteerism like this show us all how the wellness of the physical environment around us contributes to our own wellness and we should all be engaging in positive actions that empower others and create a ripple effect in the process.
Our Tenants and Community Partners
You may not know, but we also have 30 charity and community tenants using our building on a daily basis. They cover a broad spectrum of work with a local, regional, national or international remit, also rooted in practices of social change. Our tenants also include arts and wellbeing practitioners who offer affordable services to meet the needs of our local community and underserved groups. This is important. At SMH, we try to have something for everyone, but realistically our programme can’t provide everything for everyone. Through our tenants and long-standing friends who call SMH their work home, many important and wide-ranging services are available for our community and beyond. We also enable many different community members to hire our spaces at very affordable rates so they can provide other vital services and artistic, wellbeing or community offers. For anything else, we do our very best to signpost people to other local providers with whom we work who can support our community with very specific and bespoke offers.
Collective Healing and Connection
We believe in the power of community and spaces for collective support to grow and thrive: that those with lived experience can offer the best support to others and through a mutual support system, can learn and heal. Quietly, behind the scenes, we host a monthly Grief Café, for instance, to give people a space to heal with others, delivered in partnership with our tenants, the City and East London Bereavement Service. We also host a brilliant Bethnal Green mum to run sharing circles for new parents. Together, we’re breaking down the barriers that prevent people from talking about the things that they’re struggling with, ensuring that people don’t have to just pull themselves together and tough it out. You can see the work around grief further presented in wellbeing activities and art installations too, at different times, shining a light on the darkest of times for some, bringing to the surface our shared experiences to offer space for people to feel held, seen and heard.
The Power of Everyday Connection
Our weekly, regular activities also offer something that we think is incredibly important. It’s not fancy, it’s not showy, it’s just simple: connection. We advocate coming down to our building and connecting with others from your community in everything we do. We’re excited by the idea of individual wellbeing and arts practice happening at home, but our focus is on the special things that happen when people get to connect with others as they are engaging in a wellbeing practice or any form of artistic expression. We also provide lots of opportunities for volunteering so people can connect with others in their community whilst making an important contribution of their own to what we do, to support their feelings of belonging.
Addressing Injustice Through Art and Action
Through our work we also answer the call from our team and our community to programme work that shines a light on issues of global injustice, current and long-standing, that matter to you and to us. We’ve proudly held screenings, end of project fundraising parties and a Community Eid event raising money for Medical Aid for Palestinians whilst also raising money to support the humanitarian crisis in Sudan through a Gallery Exhibition Opening Event. We're proud to be a space where our community can talk about these issues, learn more and raise money to tackle injustice happening far from home. Our Ghyama Arts programme has for the past two years put the work of disabled artists into the fringe programme of the Tower Hamlets Season of Bangla Drama Festival. Our book clubs explore writing that may have been discriminated against and not been celebrated as much as it deserves. Many of our team, also, are activists in their own right, highlighting injustices in the communities of which they are part. This was beautifully captured in our staff Hidden Talents exhibition in May this year where our team covered a range of issues from forgotten female voices in history to LGBTQIA+ stories, the Western Sahara conflict, teaching sustainability to children and women's bodies in conflict. All this work breaks down barriers, encourages acceptance and tackles injustice.
Supporting the LGBTQIA+ Community
We have long been known for the work we do to provide safe and joyful spaces for the LGBTQIA+ community that celebrate queer culture and offer unique experiences that you might not find in other arts centres. From Drag Queens in exhibition, to heritage projects focused on the unknown stories of the local LGBTQIA+ community, to queer speed dating over art making, hosting the Queer Migrant Pride Festival on an annual basis and standing firm as a trans-inclusive space: we want everyone to know that they are welcome at St Margaret’s House and that we won’t tolerate discrimination or members of our community being asked to hide who they are.
Expanding Our Approach to Wellbeing
Our focus on social change is also seen in other shifts in thinking: through holistic approaches to the body and mind (not just low-cost yoga but dance, movement, singing, sound baths, acupuncture and massage), social prescription (for referrals from GPs for everything from yoga to woodwork to screen-printing), celebrating heritage crafts like Kantha Embroidery, slowing down and practising art or wellbeing in outside spaces (our annual Explore Outdoors programme) and much, much more. We create opportunities for our community to take to the stage in democratic spaces, for new and emerging artists to exhibit their work for the very first time (artwork on the walls in our Chapel space and performance pieces on the stage in our Mulberry Hall through the Freshly Squeezed Scratch Nights), for artists to have free space to create without having to produce a show at the end (our Artist in Residence programme), to enable anyone to an be artist or a health researcher (our Art Cafe and forthcoming Being Human Festival event). We’re also democratising spaces that could still feel exclusive, like our Gallery Cafe exhibitions: the artwork is right on the walls around you while you’re drinking your coffee and grabbing some lunch – like it’s in your home, your space, not at a distance and certainly not out of reach.
Engaging Young People
Our young people's programme aims to offer a different take, too: inclusive circus about perseverance with balance, concentration and focus in a skill that is all about clowning around; mindful crafting in a collaborative, collective space; board games together (as an antidote to video gaming); and finding ways to laugh at ourselves and with each other in kind and supportive ways against a backdrop of a rise in online bullying that can be so cruel. Our programme of free half term workshops and low-cost family performances bring theatre for young audiences to our community hall so it’s right on your doorstep and completely accessible.
Always Learning and Improving
We’re proud of what we’ve done to date, what we’re doing right now and what we plan to do in the future. We experiment, we try things out and we learn from our mistakes and try to keep improving. We put inclusion at the heart of what we do. We’ve achieved that in certain areas (our three tiered-pricing and focus on offering as many things for free as we can, with options for in-person cash payments when people can’t book online) but we also know the limitations of our building, which is still not as physically accessible as we might like, and we’re working to improve that every day.
Making Change Together
Above anything else, we’re open to input from others so that we can make social change together – we seek your input, we listen to what you tell us and we make changes accordingly. You may have noticed our Evaluation Tree in The Create Place when you’ve visited. This represents what we stand for: a strong and sturdy base, with roots and branches, but seeking open and everyday dialogue with our community – where anyone can give us some feedback and it’s there for others to see on the leaves.
So, how can you contribute to our mission of social change? Just by being part of it. All we ask is that you keep turning up, engaging in community connection and partaking of our sustainable practices.
Together, we can be the social change.