Drumming and Networking
Billed as a ‘Networking and Teambuilding Event for Community Activators’, the African Drumming workshop was led by Tom Morley on Saturday 18th November at Memorial Community Church. Attendees included:
1. Jess (E15), 2. Sharon (E16), 3. Kim (E6), 4. Rose (E15), 5. Magadeline (E13),
6. Gloria (E16), 7. Shona (East Ham), 8. Joy (E12), 9. Annie (E15), 10 Jacqui (E12),
11. Gavin (E6), 12. Sandy (E6), 13. Hannah (E12), 14. Mike (E15), 15. Destiny (E12),
16. Pam (E13), 17. Stephen (N4), 18. Felix (E15) and 19. Alice (E15).
Attendees were variously born or hand parents born in England, Nigeria, Ghana, Guyana, Ireland, Jamaica, France, and St. Lucia.
As the event brought together people from OCC, Jazanne Arts and Transformative Tutors (Transformative Tutors) it partly met its aspiration to be a networking and teambuilding event as well as a fun drumming experience. Positive feedback included the following:
Hi Gavin and Rose. Many thanks for organising the drumming workshop today. Tom was a fantastic choice as a teacher and motivator. He really put us at ease and made us feel confident to try. He found the ‘rockstar drummer’ within us. We left feeling rooted and connected to drums of Africa. What an excellent day.
Jacqui Livingston (Jazanne Arts)
It’s a week since the NEWHAM MOSAIC African Diaspora event. It has taken me awhile to process how profoundly moving it was to drum and sing with such a wonderful collection of people and their voices.Everyone who came does work and study in North East London. The rhythmic drumming, call and response, of our Tribes resonated with the Irish, Caribbean, French, Nigerian, British Community Activists. We visioned, we uplifted and we learned.
Shona Pollock (Transformative Tutors)
Ongoing Networking – In Person and Online
I noted in our blog post on the Drumming and Networking event that it had helped bring “projects together in a common activity, sowing the seeds of potential future collaboration”. We have gone on to work with Jazanne Arts, participating in their play ‘Breadline’ which is about a foodbank and thus links to the work of OCC which includes running a foodbank. Jazanne Arts have proposed using their play to help raise the profile of and collect donations for OCC on the nights that the play will be performed. We will discuss with Jazanne using the play and its performances as an opportunity to invite audences to discuss issues of poverty, homelessness and food insecurity on our online spaces.
In addition to working with Jazanne Arts, we have visited and explored collaborative work with CliffordHeadley of The Hibiscus Centre with whom we regularly share information, and with Tee Fabikun of the Carpenters Community Cafe where we plan to run five workshop on ‘Using AI to create a Graphic Novel’ in April 2024. We also established links with the Cornerstone Cafe with which we ran four initial Mosaic Writers Book Club sessions in November and December.
The business of making connections is central to the Newham Mosaic project and might be considered its ongoing ‘meta workshop’. The membership of this ‘meta workshop’ are effectively those who have signed up to our website, our Facebook page and our WhatsApp groups.
There are, at the time of writing, 33 members of the ‘Newham Mosaic Community’ WhatApp group. There have been about 50 posts this month by 10 members.
There are 22 members of the Newham Mosaic Facebook Group – which we will continue to work with despite some issues with Facebook.
There are 9 registered website users but more than 40 users have interacted with our forms to register on workshops. The website will become more integral to our work as we develop our online courses.
Kwanzaa Online Workshop
Our first online course was on ‘Kwanzaa’. Originally an African American celebration created in 1966, Kwanzaa has come to have significance across the African Diaspora as it represents an aspiration of African descended people to reach out to each other to achieve and celebrate 1. Umoja (Unity), 2. Kujichagulia (Self-determination) 3. Ujima (Collective work and responsibility) 4. Ujamaa (Cooperative economics) 5. Nia (Purpose) 6. Kuumba (Creativity) 7. Imani (Faith).
The workshop was led by Ayo Haynes of the Flametree Collective and there were eight attendees including two children and their parents. All were from Caribbean background. While the attendance was disappointing the delivery by Ayo was not . The closeness to Christmas doubtless contributed to the relatively sparce attendance. However Ayo has produced seven short videos on the Seven Principles. These will be put on the Mosaic Website with invitations to comment so that the Kwanzaa Workshop will continue to exist throughout the life of the project.
The Mosaic Writers Book Club
In total eight members of the Mosaic Writers Book Club attended the four session run fortnightly over November and December on Thursday evenings at the Cornerstone Cafe. We started by looking at the works of James Baldwin and discussed Benjamin Zephaniah on the last session. The regulars who stayed through all the sessions were Gavin, Kate, Sharon and Gloria. We did not recommence the workshop in the new year nor have we done with this. The intention is now to develop this as an online workshop with meetups as and when wanted.
Two Diaspora Dreaming Workshops
Two ‘Diaspora Dreaming Workshops’ were run at Memorial Community Church over two Saturdays in December. These workshops were led by Annie Smol and aimed at parents and children. The content was inspired by the work of African Diaspora artists, particularly, African American artist Faith Ringgold. We have written about the two workshops on our website’s project journal (blog) where there are many photographs and two video comments from children involved.
The Conversation Kitchen
The idea of a ‘Conversation Kitchen’ a space for social chat to run alongside the OCC Food Club was launched with the Food Club on 8th November. But it was not until the new year, in mid January that this social space took off. Now it is attended by people who use the Food Club and by people who just want to come to a friendly space to sit and talk with friends. We do not try to lead this very informal group but to participate within it.
For most of January and February we have been planning upcoming workshops including the ‘Art and Languages of Community’ event on 24th February.
The Art and Languages of Community
The Newham Mosaic’s ‘Art and Languages of Community Day’ was led by the women of Our Community Cares at Memorial Community Church on Saturday 24th February. It was a genuinely amazing event in which the OCC women spoke about their languages and cultures and in which everyone who attended participated by sharing something of their own mother cultures. Languages shared included, Hindi, Bengali, Singhalese, Tigrinya, Amharic, Portuguese Creole, Yoruba, Swahili, Twi and Konkani. We were also treated to examples of cultural art, the Ethiopian/Eritrean coffee making ceremony and delightful singing in English and Hindi. It was a day to remember and to build on.
Participants included:
1. Darshi (E16), 2. Feven (E16), 3. Sneh (E16), 4. Judy (E13), 5. John (E6)
6. Fransesca (SW1P), 7. Shona (E6), 8. Lia (E7), 9. Paul (IG6), 10. Sharon (E16)
11. Sue, 12. Lucinda, 13. Iris, 14. Felix (E15), 15. Rose (E15)
16. Remy 17. Gavin (E6)
Bringing it All Together
At the beginning of February we wrote in the blog:
In the weeks after Christmas we have been planning two online workshops and one event. The two online workshops are ‘The Story of Africa’ and ‘AI, Art, Identity and Imagination’, the event is ‘The Art and Languages of Community’.
The ‘Story of Africa’ workshops will launch on 1st March and the ‘Art and Languages of Community’ event will take place on 24th February. The ‘AI, Art, Identity and Imagination’ workshops is now planned to begin in mid-March.
During January and February we also began the Conversation Kitchen sessions, running alongside the Our Community Cares (OCC) Food Club on Fridays 12 pm to 2 pm.
Before Christmas, we had several Mosaic Writers Book Club session at the Cornerstone Cafe but these suffered from bad weather preventing some people from attending. We have not yet restarted the MWBC but plan to do so. Please watch this blog for announcements on this very soon.
As we move into March a key focus will be on ‘bringing it all together’ so that our various activities, events and workshops can be seen to work together in building the caring and creative community that will serve all of us. Again, please watch this blog to see how we are working towards this and how you can be part of it.