Forging a Spirit of Community

Before we moved to Devon, Hannah and I lived outside of Liverpool for about a year. I would listen to Radio Merseyside quite frequently and often they would broadcast an hour or so from Best-Of programmes of other regional BBC stations. Radio Devon was the one I seemed to hear most frequently. The hour-long programme would highlight music and theatre and poetry and all sorts of things going on in Devon. When we discovered we could do a job transfer down to Torbay, I was quite excited to be involved in what seemed a really good scene.

Upon looking at the South Devon Arts Scene up close, I found it to be very fragmented. There were singer-songwriters in one area who were good, but could benefit from working with this collection of musicians in this other area, but no one really seemed to want to work together. It seemed that most of the creative people I was meeting worked by themselves or didn’t know anyone else who worked in their field.

One of the most important things in the arts, and I cannot stress this enough, is development of a community. My involvement in the arts quite frequently has been to link people together in order to help people further what they do, and that’s one of the best things I feel I’ve been able to achieve since starting up Epicentre.

Epicentre Book Cafe in Paignton, which my wife Hannah and I run, is set up as a social enterprise, a not-for-profit, community-arts funding venture. Any profit Epicentre makes will be cycled back into community art projects.

Epicentre understands the need for community because in order for the business to thrive and be able to help fund community projects, it needs the involvement of the community. As dirty as money is to us artists, Epicentre does need customers in order to pay the bills. And the more customers there are, the more Epicentre can help fund community projects. There really isn’t any other way to say it: We support the community that helps support us.

We have a few community projects in the pipeline but the thing we’re most excited about is the setting up of an artists’ co-operative. This will involve artists working together, each using the strengths of the other artists to further the art of everyone involved. It might be that one member is really good at PR, one is really good at assembling portfolios, and so on. Together, as a community of artists, we will be stronger.

Already involved in this fledgling little co-op are writers and editors and publishers. We are looking at founding Epicentre Books, a community publishing company. This will be a self-sufficient, self-sustaining publishing company where the money made from one book will go to fund the creation of the next book, and so on. We’re looking at making books that involve writers and artists and photographers and graphic designers and more, so that each thing published will showcase more than one artist’s work. We’re also looking toward some community outreach books and possibly a quarterly arts magazine, depending on how things go.

The days of Arts Council grants and government support in the arts are dwindling, but there are still people with the desire to do it for themselves anyway. The way forward is to unite and collaborate. We live in exciting times, and I’m so glad to be a part of that vibrant arts scene I glimmered from afar, on the radio, all those years ago.

If you’d like more information about Epicentre and the community of artists we’re helping put together, have a look at our website: http://epicentrebookcafe.org.uk/ Or come down for a drink and a chat sometime!

Thank you for reading! Let’s get things moving together!

For more information visit http://www.epicentrebookcafe.org.uk/