WHAT A YEAR
Who’d have thought that in the last year since last April Fools Day we’d have learned to live stream, built a pirate telly station and run our own Glasto Festival on a cardboard pyramid stage and another on a cardboard cathedral!
But thanks to emergency funding from Arts Council England, The National Lottery, LDfL and DCMS we did just that and more.
Watch this film very carefully, you probably won’t believe your eyes.
WHAT A WEEK
We were delighted when our resident dad, co-founder and CEO Nick Corston was asked to be UK Country champion for the UN’s World Creativity and Innovation week, They said that his appearance launching Caine’s Global Cardboard Challenge about ten years ago had caught their eye (see clip over there).
It’s not our first dabble with the UN, Nick was invited to a General Assembly in New York about six years ago for the launch of the Global STEM Alliance - see blog here
So we’re working on a week of activity:
Open Mic - we’ll have an open mic session on the launch day of WCIW to preview the week ahead - that’s 7-9pm Thurs 19th April
Live Launch - we’ll be live at Prince of Wales School in Dorset for the first day of term Mon 21th April to launch our #InspiredToLearn21 Summer Term Tour
Live Streaming - we’ll be live streaming to and from some of the UK’s most creative schools all week
The Big Day - for World Creativity and Innovation Day itself, Weds 21st April we’ll be live streaming a whole day of content from across the UK and across the world
Creativity Conference - Nick Corston will be giving a talk at the Aspire Power Arts Conference on Sat 24th alongside some of the UK’s most creative teachers and leaders.
BE PART OF IT - ARTISTS WANTED - SIGN UP HERE
We’re keen to get as many people involved in our week as possible so if you’d like to speak, sing or just be kept up to date so you can join us in the studio audience (a Zoom room) sign up here
Yes we want this to be as engaging and interactive as possible and want you to be part of it, not just sitting there watching someone else chatting away.
Cardboard creativity
All of the above will be live streamed from the cardboard cathedral you see over there, that we built for our #Coventry21 Community Art Festival weekend on a school playing field in the city to mark both Coventry 2021 UK City of Culture and also how the cathedral, like the city, like the country, like the world rose from the ashes after the war.
Also to mark the tenure of the late Sir Ken Robinson (1950-2020) as Professor of Education at nearby Warwick University in the heart of Shakespeare County.
DO SUPPORT US IF YOU CAN
STEAM Co. is a non-profit community enterprise that Campaigns for, Inspires and Actions Art and Creativity in our Schools, Work and Lives. When all our work in and with school communities was cancelled with the advent of Covid-19 we were grateful for funding from LGfL, Arts Council England and then Culture Recovery Funding from DCMS and HM Teasury.
Using that we incompletely re engineered our community engagement model to 100% online and now a flexible hybrid model running four big festival events and a number of pop ups and live streams across the UK.
Sadly that ran out at the end of Mach and we sadly were rejected from a second round of DCMS funding given massive demand.
If you can spare as little as a pound a month please support our Creative Carer Patreon. For a few quid more we’ll print you a t-shirt and a bit more than that you could even sponsor one of our half or full day school sessions.
Or sponsor one of the STEAM Co. Drop Trucks and STEAMsters we ant to send out across the UK to ‘help connect our kids with their art and our communities with their schools’.
See film below or go to Creative Carer Patreon page here