Bristol’s pioneering Watershed cinema and media centre has received funding to build on the creativity and compassion of communities during the Covid-19 pandemic through stories, narratives and public imagination projects.
The National Lottery Community Fund has given £49,500 to the Towards Equitable Futures programme, enabling Watershed to work with a design team that includes Zahra Ash-Harper (its independent creative director of inclusion), Bill Sharpe (independent futures practitioner and researcher in science, technology and society), Rife (the online magazine that supports young people to have their voices heard) and Pervasive Media Studio community to together imagine a new future. 
They will bring together a community of 165 creatives, researchers, students and companies drawn from cultures and backgrounds across Bristol. The work is to be created in the Pervasive Media Studio, using art and creative technology to explore, interrogate and invent the future.
They will work side by side, meet regularly and engage in shared action around themes such as technology, ethics and sustainability.
will take as its starting point the fact that change is common currency but is still not fully representative and that while change has happened, it has been on the interdependent structures of white privilege, patriarchy and extractive capitalism, therefore full participation has not always been possible.
Pervasive Media Studio executive producer Jo Lansdowne said: “We want to say a huge thank you to The National Lottery and its players for the opportunity to look to the future with courage and imagination.
“Built around creative technology and film the Watershed community is known for challenging the dominant structures of art, society and technology.
“We hope that this project will inform how we rebuild Watershed as a key part of the creative ecology, offering a model for others to learn from – a ‘regenerative compass’ to navigate the future as individuals in relation to our communities and the systems within which they exist.”
Watershed is one of 51 organisations across the UK to receive a grant of up to £50,000 through the Emerging Futures Fund. The funding, from the largest funder of community activity in the UK, will help harness the creativity of civil society and amplify the voices of communities through stories, narratives and public imagination projects.
