Thanks to everyone who made 2024 such a success for Brink!
Critical Mass cyclists completing their circuit of Belfast ending at the Brink! site.
Brink! was started by Gawain Morrison and Paul Kelly to be a platform that would engage citizens in discussions and actions around issues of climate change. Our aspiration was that we could inspire people to be agents of change by DOING not just saying, and that we would use culture and cultural interventions as the tools for the job.
We needed to walk the walk ourselves, so by the end of 2023 we had spent a year building a lot of relationships, listened to a lot of conversations, and established our core messaging 'What Should This City Do?’, along with the 6 themes in our lives we need to address to meet issues relating to climate change: We Live, We Eat, We Wear, We Waste, We Power and We Travel.
What Should This City Do?
2024 was a year of action after this year of research and discussion, turning a city centre derelict site into a community growing space and cultural venue, running weekender conferences and festivals to discuss what this city should do in the face of climate change, hosted an array of community and citizen cultural events across food, film, music, and art, partnered with corporate and academic institutions, and built connections around Ireland and the UK.
Belfast Food Partnership discussions with Landworkers Alliance and Belfast Repair Cafe
On this journey we have built deep friendships, found that the awareness of climate change impact is everywhere, that there are a lot of people trying to make a difference for society, that it is hard to make change, that the systems that we live our daily lives in are not fit for purpose in the face of climate change, largely misunderstanding the extreme urgency of the change we need to make, and the resulting social pressures that we will need to navigate.
But change is happening and it’s gaining traction. It now needs focus and an understanding of how to support and empower change because it’s clear we all want it.
I love our earth & our wee Belfast
In 2025 we will nurture this past amazing year of momentum and develop our cultural platform. Our three areas of focus will be:
Innovation workshops to engage with our heritage and learn new skills from each other
Cultural events to bring change makers together (and have a bit of fun)
Creative and cultural outputs to tell stories & empower people through food, art, design, music and literature.
Sunflower and a KVLR
A huge amount happened through this year, so below are a selection of Brink! engagement highlights. We want to send a massive thank you to everyone who has been so supportive of us, gifted us their expertise and time, provided resources and funding, and turned up to share in some very memorable events together.
#whatshouldthiscitydo #bechangemakers #playthinkbrink #doittogether
JANUARY
Queen’s University Belfast lecturer, Dr Neil Galway, focuses his teaching on engagement with planning and urban design policy and practice. Neil ran a series of evenings and invited speakers to City Conversation on SDGs: Regeneration, Engagement and Net Zero, exploring real places and lived experiences, and Neil invited Brink! to present their meanwhile Belfast Stories project as a living example of this in our city centre.
FEBRUARY
Creative Ireland’s Climate Action Fund is supporting projects from across Ireland with the aim of using culture to engage and empower communities around issues relating to climate change. Nina McGowan’s House on the Beach project is being delivered by Trinity and Brink! and we took part in a series of workshops with the other Creative Ireland projects to come up with the community engagement models. To hear the depth, meaning and intent from so many people across a range of disciplines and backgrounds, was inspiring. 2024 saw a range of projects successfully delivered, so go check them out and keep an eye out for Nina’s thought-provoking House on the Beach in summer 2025.
We also picked up the keys for the Belfast Stories site and began work bringing life to this urban desert. We kicked off with hosting a Bio Blitz with students from the Queen’s University School of Biological Sciences, identifying a lot more species than we expected in a derelict space in the heart of Belfast city centre. We’ve carried on recording species through the year and you can review them here in iNaturalist.
Funding supported by the National Lottery Heritage Fund and the DAERA Carrier Bag Levy scheme allowed us to engage with partners quarto and Grow NI, to run a 12 month community heritage project on the site, investigating our broken connection to our food past, understand our relationship with growing food today, and what we need to do to prepare for the future in the face of climate change. This project was called ‘A Growing Story’, and brought together a diversity of citizens from across Belfast, whether native to Belfast or who now found this to be home. It’s been a privilege to share stories, learn new skills, and bring life to an urban desert with all of these people.
The first meeting we hosted was on the derelict site, to get a sense of the space. We then moved into the Belfast Central Library, to discuss what we might do through the year and to make St Brigids Crosses together, as our initial heritage act together.
MARCH
The Imagine Festival presents a unique way of imagining the future of our great city. The Food Ethics Council and Brink! co-hosted a Belfast Food Partnership event as part of the Imagine Festival. ‘Belfast Food Stories’ was an opportunity to tell inspiring stories by people on the ground, making a change through food in our city, and to ask attendees to share their food stories with us. From this event, a young Belfast artist came up with the new logo for the Belfast Food Partnership – inspired.
The Belfast Food Partnership logo
The Belfast Food Partnership
It was important for us to build the site with our core community so as part of ‘A Growing Story’, our partners quarto and Grow NI prepared activities for us to share in completing together, a session to learn about the heritage of a theme, cook together, eat together and then share stories and thoughts. This was our first session on the site together, and shaped a lot of what was to come through the rest of the year.
APRIL
We accompanied Professor John Barry and a collection of masters and PhD students from Queen’s University Belfast to Cloughjordan Ecovillage to hear their journey, their successes and challenges, and their aspirations for the next chapter of the village. It was refreshing to hear the warts and all stories from the residents and businesses, that framed this journey of change as a challenging one, but one that is doable, enjoyable, and necessary for us all. It was a quiet bus home, but one that fuelled a new sense of urgency and passion to make change.
We spent most of this month working with Boxman, Lee Hamilton, converting our shipping containers, cutting steel, installing doors and windows, fitting them out with power, lighting and walls. Some pup! During this process of building the site, we learnt a lot about sourcing materials, repurposing existing resources, and designing urban spaces for growing food, plants and hosting events. Thanks to International Synergies for introducing us to so many organisations that helped us out.
MAY
The Co-Centre for Climate + Biodiversity + Water launched in Trinity College Dublin, bringing together some of the leading researchers in Ireland and UK to present the six year program aspirations, partners, and research areas. A consortium of 14 academic institutions, led by Professor Yvonne Buckley (Trinity College Dublin), Professor Mark Emmerson (Queen’s University Belfast) and Professor Ed Hawkins (University of Reading), the aim is to create solutions that benefit ecosystems and communities at local, regional, and global levels, tackling the complex challenges of climate change, biodiversity loss and declining water quality.
Brink! worked with the Co-Centre this year, as education and public engagement partners, hosting discussion panels at the Brink! weekender conferences, showcasing Ed’s stripes for Belfast on the site, and will translate coastal science for the House on the Beach project through 2025.
This was also the month of Hit The North, Belfast’s legendary street art festival, and we got to work with the Graffic lads as part of the festival, to paint up our large wall mural for the city. Thanks to Belfast Central Library for providing us the canvas.
And we finally managed to get a canopy cover up, with the help of the lads at Stretch Tents & Canopies. It took us ages to find a second hand one that would fit the space, but these fellas came through for us & it’s been worth it’s weight in gold.
JUNE
After three months of hard grafting to build the Brink! space on the Belfast Stories site, we officially opened to the public with our ‘Summer Solstice from the Brink!’ Weekender with live broadcast on BBC Radio Ulster. We had twenty different organisations and over one thousand people attending events, panels & discussions across the two days, about ‘What Should This City Do?” in the face of climate change. Thanks to all the companies and people who helped us to source the materials, from bathtubs to spare windows and doors, from cabling to wood – without you we couldn’t have done it.
This was an immense weekend of music, film, food, drink & discussions. Thanks very much to Paul McClean & the BBC Radio Ulster team for helping us to live broadcast the summer solstice gig, and to our awesome DJs who made it so special: Timmy Stewart (the legend), Kwame Daniels (straight off the plane from New York), Warriors of the Dystotheque (launching the new album) and taking it home Marion Hawkes (owner of Belfast’s Sound Advice record store).
After an intense day of discussions around issues of climate change in our city, this was the perfect way to end the evening. And Sunday was a wonderful journey of films & discussions in our outdoor cinema, from Merlin Sheldrake’s Fungi: Web of Life to Jonathon Pie shorts, from Taqi Spateen’s War on the Wall to The Yes Men Are Revolting.
Below is just one of the recordings from the panel discussions, this one with Dr Adrian Pugsley (Ulster University) and Steven Agnew (Director, RenewableNI)
Other panels that we hosted included:
WE EAT: Miriam Turley (Social Farms & Gardens) / Sean McDermott (L’Arche Village / Source Grow) / Rory Blight (L’Arche Village / Source Grow)
WE LIVE: Ciaran Fox (Director of the Royal Society Of Ulster Architects) / Pauline O’Flynn (PPR / Grow NI)
WE WEAR: Siobhan Purnell (Keep NI Beautiful)
WE WASTE: Liam McNally (International Synergies) / Eric Randall (Director, Bryson Recycling)
WE TRAVEL: Dr Neil Galway (School of Natural & Built Environment, Queen’s University Belfast) / Andrew McClean (Northern Ireland Engagement Officer - Cycling UK)
FOOD STORIES: Mike’s Fancy Cheese, Bakari, Greg Sancho, & Biruk Sahle - A conversation with some local food heroes who are making a success of keeping it local, and being in tune with the craft of nature and food.
It was a busy month with the Belfast Food Partnership hosting a food connections event, where Will McConnell presented his food data work, Barry Ferguson introduced the Landworkers Alliance, and Chris McCartney spoke of Transition Together and the Belfast Repair Café.
The National Lottery Heritage Fund team brought together partners, museums and heritage organisations from across Northern Ireland for a day of discussions and workshops, led by Mike Murawski, to investigate what it means to be a museum, and how to embrace building stronger community-centered practice.
JULY
Whilst the work of building and maintaining a meanwhile space never stops, a large moment for us was when we finally completed our solar power setup so that we could run our power and lighting fully off grid. A big thank you to Neil Beattie for working with us to get the install completed, and to Daniel Parke and the renewables team at the School of Natural and Built Environment at Ulster University, and the EEL Consortium for helping us with the equipment.
We also had the privilege of working with the Pride team to use the Brink! site as the family friendly and relax zone for the festival at the end of the month.
AUGUST
One of Belfast’s food business success stories, and friend of Brink!, is SUKI tea. They have been experimenting with growing Irish tea, and how it fairs in our climate. Co-founder and owner, Oscar Woolley brought some tea plants to live on the Brink! site, and through August and September picked leaves from Irish grown tea plants that he had shared around Belfast. He then blended them for citizens of Belfast, as a live event for the Autumn Equinox weekend on the Brink! site – Ireland’s first ever homegrown tea blend of tea! Thanks for sharing Oscar.
We had an embarrassment in our city, as with other places around UK and Ireland, with a couple of weeks of orchestrated racism protests and attacks. We were proud to stand with all of the citizens of Belfast, no matter where they had come from, and be part of city marches against racism, and make sure that people knew that our Brink! space was a safe space for all. #notinourname
And we rounded out the month with an awesome Summer Weekender of music with three great independent music promoters, On The Fence, The Night Institute and The Homespun Soundsystem. The sun shone, our friends and neighbours the Sunflower Pub kept the drinks flowing, and we danced our socks off in Belfast’s coolest outdoor space.
SEPTEMBER
This was a big month of events with the European Heritage Weekend, our Autumn Equinox from the Brink! Weekender with Climate Craic, our Culture Bridge partnership with our German friends from Art Park, and the Climate+ Co-Centre DAERA visit to Helens Bay Organic farm, to discuss the Northern Irish food system.
Supported by the Belfast Stories team, we hosted heritage discussions on the Brink! site with our partners quarto and Grow NI, for European Heritage Weekend. Craig Sands demonstrated cob fire building, and Bryonie Reid shared stories about the area, and asked people to share their stories on our hanging linen tree.
Professor Mark Emmerson, co-director of the Co-Centre for Climate + Biodiversity + Water organised a site visit to John McCormick’s Helens Bay Organic, bringing together regenerative and organic farmers from around the Belfast area to meet with a group from the food and farming departments of DAERA to give an opportunity for the agroecological and food groups and farmers to have their voices heard. Attendees included the Landworkers Alliance, Carrick Greengrocers, Social Farms and Gardens and Ben Vista CSA. The aim was so that the insights from the meeting could feed into the NI Food Strategy Framework, which sets out to deliver better outcomes for food in Northern Ireland in the future. As co-chair of the Belfast Food Partnership, Brink! co-founder Gawain Morrison was one of those present, and it was an important kick-off meeting, as we look to a food resilient city in the face of climate change – we need more investment into the agroecology sector to make this a reality.
Supported by the Goethe Institute and the Arts Council of Northern Ireland, Cultural Bridge supports UK and German cultural organisations to develop partnerships exploring artistic collaboration and social arts practice. Colour Stories: Joint Journeys of a Colour Garden, was our Cultural Bridge project presented by Brink! in partnership with artpark Hoher Berg in Germany.
As part of our Autumn Equinox weekend festival, members of the public were able to take part in natural dyeing workshops, helping to create colourful flags to be displayed in Brink’s sustainable city garden. We took participants on a creative journey through a colour story: the ancient knowledge of extracting natural colour dyes from plants. It was very special to build this friendship with the folks from Art Park and look forward to working with them again through 2025 – watch this space. Thanks Arts Council NI and Culture Bridge for the support.
To celebrate the ‘Autumn Equinox from the Brink!’ weekend festival we partnered with Climate Craic to bring the best of climate and environmental workshops, panels and events to the heart of Belfast. Topics centred around food, waste, fashion, climate justice, and the importance of culture in inspiring change. We hosted 60 different organisations and welcomed over 2000 members of the public attending events across the 3 days panels & discussions, engaging in workshops and conversations about ‘What Should This City Do?” in the face of climate change, with specific focus on themes of We Eat, We Waste, We Wear, ecojustice and our environment, with a focus on Lough Neagh.
OCTOBER
The final Friday of each month sees Critical Mass take over the streets of Belfast, with a revolution of cyclists taking to the streets representing the need for streets to be more bicycle friendly. It’s a lot of fun, it’s all ages, it’s had skateboarders, roller bladers, and a disco bike, from Belfast’s mobile disco Bang Bike, leading us like a pied piper each month. As the Brink! site is a public space, a safe space, and coincidentally on the street where the Critical Mass following finishes each month, we’ve had the good fortune to bask in the reflected glory of a wonderful monthly event. If you’ve got wheels and will travel, then get yourselves out to one of these great Friday evenings.
As a result of these events, a collection of the cyclists, led by Leo Fagan, ran a bike repair café on the site for 6 weeks to spread the knowledge of how to care for and repair your bikes .. helped along with a few pizzas.
We also continued our hands across Ireland friendships journeying to Dublin to meet the folks running The Field, as part of the National College of Art and Design, and Taplins Field Community Garden, in The Liberties. Next door neighbour green spaces, sharing the same vision for growing, food, nature and design for citizens and students in urban Dublin. On the return visit to Belfast Craig Sands from Grow NI fired up his cob fulacht fiadh, to steam a beautiful meal food for our NCAD and Taplin’s Fields visitors.
Following on from the National Lottery Heritage event in June, Mike Murawski’s ‘Agents of Change’ invited the team involved in our project ‘A Growing Story’, Bryonie and Gemma Reid from quarto, Craig Sands from Grow NI, and Paul and myself from Brink!, to his podcast to discuss ‘Can Something as Simple as a Community Garden Save Our Planet?’
NOVEMBER
As part of this year’s ReAct festival, Brink! partnered with the Climate + Co-Centre to run a workshop exploring new ways to think and act in our city, ‘Our Story, Our City, Our Responsibility - What you DO makes a difference!‘ . The session was a discussion panel and collaborative workshop to crowdsource ideas about how our city should innovate to meet the challenges of Climate Change. We invited citizens to take part in roundtable discussions, hosted by systems change innovators addressing sustainability across the Brink! themes: We Eat, We Live, We Wear, We Waste, We Power and We Travel. We also had the treat of Eritrean music to break up the session, provided by Beyond Skin artists.
Chris Packham was in Belfast to present his insights on the fierce battle for our planet’s future, as part of the Our Stories festival. On his way to the hotel, our friends at the Northern Ireland Science Festival brought Chris to meet us at our site, where he was very generous with his time. Just as it was about to snow, we sat round our mycelium fire pit and chatted about this part of the city, the heritage growing project on the site, with our partners Grow NI & quarto, the broken food system, renewables, activism and punk bands. A lovely fella, and a great way to spend a morning.
In the same week we had a visit from Jamie Peters, CEO of Friends of the Earth, James Orr, Director of FOENI, and the rest of the NI team, to learn more about what we’re doing on the site, and as a platform for change.
We had a couple of other lovely sessions for the Our Stories festival, one on the Brink! site called ‘Story Soup’, where we warmed ourselves round the fire, ate gorgeous soup provided by Craig Sands from Grow NI, and invited people to share their Belfast Stories on our story wall, under our headline of ‘What Should This City Do?’ Thanks to everyone who braved a chilly evening to share their stories with us.
And Gawain Morrison hosted a panel on Sustainable Arts in Action, with Tumble Circus, Problem Patterns and Native Events, who announced their sustainable industry research that they’re been commissioned to carry out for NI Music with Belfast City Council.
Carrick Greengrocers and Cooperative Alternatives hosted an inspiring event in Carrick town hall as a Transition Together day of talks and workshops, bringing together change makers from across the north of Ireland, from farming, to food, to energy, to co-operatives. A movement is definitely happening.
We co-hosted the Outburst festival weekend market with Sunflower Pub, and had an amazing turnout on a grey day, to support the local crafts, arts and food producers of the city.
DECEMBER
We’re rounding out a cracking year with a series of community events with our core group involved with A Growing Story, across themes of mapping, tea and a special Yule event with the vocal ensemble, the HIVE choir. Under the direction of John D’Arcy, HIVE creates music from found text and often uses verbal notation and audio technologies, inviting participation from non-expert performers and audience members. So he worked with the community from A Growing Story, and they will return for Yule to sing their take on the project.
Working with the maps and photos held in Belfast Central Library, our team produced an insightful mapping session, discussing the changes in Belfast’s architecture, planning, green spaces, living spaces, industry and social engineering over 400 years. And Oscar Wolley from SUKI tea is back with us discussing his relationship with tea, the economics and ethics of producing tea, and why he wants to grow tea in Ireland.
And closing out the year we have been working with the faculty of Medicine, Health and Life Sciences at Queen’s University Belfast, with the intention of translating over 40 papers from an array of research themes into public facing stories across the themes of ‘We Eat’ and ‘We Live’. This has been a fascinating process, providing us with the opportunity to access current climate, food, biodiversity and health research, and we’re looking forward to producing the outputs from the research in early 2025.
If you’ve a project, research, or partnership opportunity, we’d be keen to hear from you, even if it’s just to kick off the conversation. You never know where a chat will take you. You can contact us at hello@playthinkbrink.com