RSA Engage Leeds

Last night down at the Whitecloth gallery was another one of RSA's Engage events which is a combination of speakers pitching their ideas and the chance to network with like minded individuals. RSA is ultimately all about coming together to create/ share/ talk about ideas for social change. As this is what a lot of my practice revolves around this year, mostly my CoP but also my extended practice, it was a good chance to potentially get involved in some live briefs and to make contact with those with a similar mindset to myself.

Got Your Back

John from Eskimo Soup, a social marketing agency, discussed his idea to create a trusted social platform that people can turn to when they are dealing with issues of mental health. The network is to be for students and co-written by them also, by getting other students involved it creates a more accurate database of information regarding any issues users may encounter. I feel like this idea will work well purely because of how most current, social media networks are a battleground where any goes, public or not, people can often feel subjected to criticisms and judgement from others within the network, friends or not.

Me and John both spoke briefly one to one about his idea and about the potential for me to be involved within it, as this could become one of my live briefs for my extended practice. Not only that but will give me the chance to get experience of a real world brief and to make both friends and contacts for the future.

Fuel for School

Fuel for School was set up by ex headteacher, Nathan Atkinson, who stumbled across a few separate problems during his time there that he thought he could solve through one idea. 

1. Remove hunger as a barrier to learning

2. Highlight the importance of nutrition and the associated benefits linked to learning

3. Highlight the vast amounts of wasted (yet perfectly edible) food across our local and wider communities.

The concept behind this is to feed school kids using food that would have unnecessarily gone to waste otherwise. There are currently 10,000 children signed up who benefit from his programme.

The Soft Road

Melanie and Neil Kirkbridge created The Soft Road in the hope to bring light to the benefits of meditation in everyday life. 

'The Soft Road is a platform for personal and cultural transformation that helps people and groups thrive in creative action. On The Soft Road we set out an Experience of Life that unwinds stress, unlocks creativity, develops intuition, and builds resilience. These inner resources create a foundation of stability and adaptability that deepens over time and brings greater ease to every day.'

They spoke a lot about bringing meditation into the workplace to improve overall well being for each individual which is something that really resonated with me and some of my work from previous years. This links in perfectly also with the RSA student awards brief I intend to do about well being in the workplace.

I spoke to both Melanie and Neil after their talk about our experiences with meditation and I felt like they had a lot to offer, so much so that we discussed them potentially coming to the university to do a small talk/ session about meditation.