Transcript
Julia
Stour Space is one of the few organisations based here on Fish Island that actually enables local communities to come and interact. It’s a place for people to come and have coffee, meet their neighbours, but at the same time it provides a space for exhibitions for local artists.
Because of the way the area’s developing, a lot of artists need affordable space, and we have 32 creative individuals and studios here at Stour Space. And they can actually rent from us and, also, we provide them with advice as to how they can create their enterprises, how they can develop enterprises and just interact and network with each other, really.
Kate
Basically, we’re a cooperative. We’re a supermarket, as you can see. We have members that come and join us. They pay £25 a year. For that, they get a vote but they also have responsibility, and their responsibility is to give us four hours of their time. And within that, there’s a whole range of things they can do to contribute. So when you come in here, and you actually see people wearing yellow T-shirts and working, it really has this sense of ‘for the people, by the people’, because they’re actually working in their own community, to actually get better quality food in here, to actually tackle things like social cohesion and food waste.
Ben
We have some great guys come in, with some really bad backgrounds, that walk away with some fantastic lives and they’ve got a fantastic opportunity at the end of it. Like, these guys, they come, some of them, you see their knife skills, they teach them, they’re coming out of college. You think, oh wow. You look at it like, it’s better than mine. You know what I mean? But no, it’s amazing. And then when you watch them graduate at the end of it, it’s like, it again, it becomes really emotional. It’s like, well, do you know what? I’ve just put a whole year of my life in teaching them, and this is what we get.