Some examples of projects supported by the Lipman-Miliband Trust:
In 2019, we funded the ‘Working Together’ project which explored how workers’ co-operatives had achieved co-operation in reality.
The project used volunteers to interview around 300 people with experience of worker co-operatives. They secured 25 archive deposits that might otherwise have been lost. Now all these experiences are available online at the National Co-Operative Archive website.
The Trust is interested in radical histories and politics.
The ‘Resist’ project was an imaginative coming together of history and storytelling which resulted in a widely-read and well-received book edited by Ra Page and published by Comma Press in 2019. Short story writers worked in partnership with academic advisors to create well-researched narratives of acts of defiance in Britain from Boudica’s rebellion against Roman rule to the response to the Grenfell fire. The result was not just a book but a series of launches and events, one on YouTube, and a number of podcasts.
The Trust is always keen to work with young people and marginalised groups.
The Shake Zine project was sponsored by Platform and brought together 17 young people from ‘Voices that Shake’ to produce their own zine which the Trust provided funding for in late 2017. This is what one person said: ‘I love zines and got a lot of energy and new ideas from the Shake zine. It just wants to make you go out and make your own’.
The Trust works with local communities as well as with national projects. ‘Building a Commons’ focussed on the use of a house in East London as a space for a variety of groups. The project was already up and running but it needed funding to extend the range of groups involved and the variety of activities it could sponsor. Five new groups joined the community which describes itself as ‘collectively organised’ and a space for ‘radical ideas and action’. Our award from 2018 was to help the existing community grow.
In 2016, the Trust awarded funding to the Jubilee Debt Campaign to deliver, amongst other things, twelve in-depth workshops across the UK. A total of seven workshops were organised in five Further Education colleges, including Croydon College, New VIC College, West London College, Coleg Menai and Coleg Llangefni, reaching 182 students. The workshops focused on workers’ rights, low pay and precarious work in order to better understand the dynamics of economic inequality across the UK. Five whole-day economics workshops were also delivered in five UK cities in 2017 – Liverpool, Manchester, Newcastle, London and Birmingham, with an average of 15 attendees at each workshop. A two-day social and economic justice convergence was also held in Middlesbrough in April 2017. Entitled ‘Teesside Together’, it was attended by more than 100 people from diverse backgrounds and from across the Teesside area. The funds from the Trust helped to pay the travel fares for those who would have otherwise been unable to attend, including refugees and benefit-claimants.
The impact of the workshops was extremely successful, with participants leaving feedback such as:
Jayaben Desai
In 2017, the Trust awarded funding to Townsend Theatre, which collaborated with the Grunwick40Project and their theatre, trade union, museum and library partners to produce a piece of high-quality touring theatre as part of the 40th anniversary commemorations of the 1976-78 Grunwick dispute and to celebrate the contribution of the leader of the Grunwick Film Processing Factory Strike, Jayaben Desai. Excerpts of the production were further performed at Trade Union conferences, and the production was a centrepiece of seminars at Ruskin College and the Marx Memorial Library. The show successfully toured to venues across the UK, and was critically acclaimed in national and local newspapers, resulting in a 4-star review in the Observer. The show also featured in the Guardian readers’ top 10 shows of 2017, as well as in the Critics’ Choice 2017 in LondonTheatre1.
In 2017, the Trust awarded funding to Spring Reign. Spring Reign was developed in association with the Rethink Rebuild Society (a Syrian community organisation in Manchester), and scripted by Manchester writer Rob Johnston. The play toured theatres nationally, during May and June 2017, including the Lowry (Salford), Harrogate Theatre, Cast (Doncaster), Live@TheLibrary (Oldham), the Albany (London), the Old Fire Station (Oxford), Nottingham Playhouse, the Assembly Rooms (Durham University) and the Hyde Festival Theatre. The play received outstanding reviews in major media outlets, and received four-star reviews from The Reviews Hub and the Yorkshire Post. The Guardian’s review of the play described it as ‘Compelling – both as theatre and in its attempt to bear witness and give a voice to Syrian people.’
Complete list of projects supported by the Lipman-Miliband Trust since 1996