Cardboard Camps – Cardboard Citizens

Carboard Citizens have received £60,000 since 2019 to support the creation of Cardboard Camps, a three-year project which seeks to train people in the creative arts through partnering with local arts venues as hubs for creativity and empower local communities to explore their stories and make real change by sharing and using Theatre of the Oppressed approaches. Each ‘Camp’ will see Cardboard Citizens partnering with a local theatre, which will become a hub for activity that will draw in local expertise, charities, housing organisations, and artistic practitioners. It is the hope that each residency forms the foundations to leave a lasting legacy to bring change for those affected by homelessness in the region.

 

In 2015, Cardboard Citizens received a previous £20,000 grant to support fourteen consortia of organisations to conduct research and development of participatory performing arts models that push organisational and practice boundaries, and establish the core of a community of learning initiated by the Foundation, contributing to advances in the sector. The project aimed to train participants from homeless/vulnerable backgrounds as citizen-researcher-performers to survey one London street and record its residents and workers to develop a verbatim theatre piece, later performed to local and non-local audiences.