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SOCIALLY ENGAGED PRACTICE IS ABOUT COLLABORATION- RELATIONSHIPS. THERE IS NO WAY THAT ANY OF THIS COULD HAVE HAPPENED WITHOUT THE AMAZING COMMUNITIES, ARTISTS, PARTNERS, FUNDERS AND VERY CRUCIALLY OUR SOLID AND FANTASTIC TEAM AND BOARD AT TAKE A PART.
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Extraordinary News from
Take A Part

On Accepting An MBE
BY KIM WIDE, TAKE A PART CEO

I have spent much of my life working to bring opportunities to people to explore and share their culture and collaborate with artists to create new conversations. To investigate issues and try to find ways to get the best opportunities for everyone in a place. To give people agency to represent themselves.

I love absolutely everything about community building and creative engagement.  About making art with people that is for people and by people.  To say I am passionate about socially engaged practice and community building would be an understatement.  I see it as my own activism.  It means everything to me. 

It was certainly a surprise to learn that I have been awarded an MBE for services to Socially Engaged Art in the South West - and I have accepted it. 

I have read a lot of articles from those who have accepted and those who have declined.  It seems for many, the decision is challenging to reach and I can see why. There are the issues of the Empire and its history of extraction and exploitation, issues of privileges and titles, issues of identity to contest with among others. I thought a lot about their reasons and I recognise this as much as I can. 

I also thought about what the award could do for my cause, my activism.  What would be gained for community embedded creative projects should I decline it?  I am not nearly a powerful or notorious enough person to be able to start national debates around it.  What is the opportunity that the MBE affords my work vs not having one? 

The MBE allows me to amplify socially engaged art. To evidence that it is valuable and something to invest in.  Worthwhile and celebrated. To do more and go further.  To bring more opportunities for more partnerships, investments, funding and support for the communities we work with to do more and have more.  It validates the practice and calls for it to be given more opportunity to thrive within the cultural sector.  So I am going to take it for that reason. 

I am also going to take it to share it with everyone who helped socially engaged art in the South West develop and flourish.  Socially engaged practice is about collaboration - relationships.  There is no way that any of this could have happened without the amazing communities, artists, partners, funders and very crucially our solid and fantastic team and board at Take A Part.

Of course, there are personal reasons as well. Wrapped up in my own history and identity - being a child of a colony. I am the granddaughter of a Welsh miner who had to leave the UK to find work in Canada when his industry was being dismantled by the government.  I am the daughter of a boy who arrived in a new land aged 14 and put in vocational training because his education had not been invested in.  A boy who worked very hard for a lifetime to create a place for himself and his family in a strange land and gain his own identity there.  

I am not from this place but the UK  has been a part of my family - mythologised as ‘home’ although I am always different here.  Always foreign.  This award makes me feel like somehow I belong a little more here. And I like it. 

These things are complicated.  Nuanced.  I respect that as much as I respect this opportunity to use the privilege that it brings and to attempt to accomplish more.  I hope I can.

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