Do Your Thing Awards

Anand Milan Elderly Centre will host a bhajan sing competition within the community. Bhajans in Hindu tradition are a form of congregational singing and bonding. The Centre will do a callout across the district for people who want to participate. 10 singers will then be selected to perform at the competition event with a public audience, before judges select three applicants for the awards. 

Baildon Civic & Historical Society will be celebrating their moorland heritage by creating a live performance of ‘The Hermit’, a story first told in word and song by the Mountain Ash Folk Group in 1976. The performance will have a video backdrop of moorland vistas, and the music will be provided by a local folk music band, which local residents are invited to come along and enjoy. 

Bingley and District Local History Society in collaboration with Bingley Camera Club and Graham West are creating an exhibition of recently discovered photos taken in Bingley by Frank West in the 1960s. The photos capture the landscape and people of Bingley before de-industrialisation and the archive will launch to the public in Damart Mill on 3 May 2025.  

Alongside the exhibition, there will be a creative community activity for the public to participate in. Led by Bingley Camera Club, they will prepare the photos for printing with the local community. Bingley History Society volunteers will then work with Graham West to identify 20 prints for the primary display of the exhibition. 

The Bingley Bell Ringers will be running a day event alongside the ‘Ale Saints Beer Festival’ with a current working title of ‘Beer and Bells’. Activity will include a treasure trail and quiz relating to the history of the bells. Children will have the opportunity to play the bell chimes, visit the tower and take part in handbell ringing demonstrations. 

Bradford Belles will be doing a performance in Darley Street Market after its opening in Spring 2025. The performance will involve a walkabout act that will invite people to watch their dance section and even join in! This event will be used to create awareness about the group and encourage new members to join. 

The Big Knitters in association with Bradford Study Support Network will be running two community workshops, encouraging newcomers to contribute to ‘the big knit’. This will include some intergenerational work through their links with a local youth project. 

Bradford Youth Activity Club will be running four rap, spoken word and poetry session for young people in Bradford district to explore new avenues to express themselves. The first part of the session provides explanations and examples of rap, spoken word and poetry, with guidance for young people to write their own, before concluding with performances from the young people. 

In partnership with Oasis Academy, Connecting Roma CIC will be hosting a festive event called ‘Mikulas’, also known as St Nicholas Day: a traditional event that takes place throughout Europe! Mikulas is accompanied by his angel, Krampus, who will give out small gifts. The event will feature performances from Bradford’s own traditional Romani dance group, Terne Naja, live music from young traditional music collective, Romano Lasa and performances from students at Oasis Academy – a fun, festive and slightly spooky event for all ages. 

Denholme Shared Church will have an installation outside of the church throughout May and June 2025 called ‘Peace Doves’. The local community will be invited to create their own doves and/or write their personal prayers or wishes for Peace on each dove. 

Feeding Bradford and Keighley will select one organisation in each constituency to host a showing of five short films created in partnership with the University of Leeds for the Food on Film project. These films highlight different elements of how our district is combating food insecurity as a community.

Guests can bring a baked bread that means something to them along to the events. This bread can be broken and shared along with personal stories about why they selected it. The aim is to celebrate the diversity of their community through this simple idea and show how different cultures have adapted this staple food.

Friends of Brackenhill Park will be organising a three-part series for a group of people to participate in a nature walk around Brackenhill Park. The walk will include painting on a canvas, mug painting and a picnic. The facilitator will guide them through the painting activities, encouraging participants to paint what they appreciate most in their lives. 

Friends of Crag Community Hub are purchasing disposable cameras for the local community to capture a ‘day in the life of Crag’. People will be encouraged to take photos of the local Crag area, which will then be displayed at an open day in the hub during Spring/Summer 2025. 

Friends of Myrtle Park will create a graffiti style mural painted onto the wall of the ramp located in the skate park of Myrtle Park. Their aim is to improve an overlooked but popular area in the park to create a space the skaters can take pride in. They will work alongside local skaters to select an artist and collaborate to create the design. 

Haworth Stitch Group will be creating a footprint stretching the length of Haworth Main Street, inspired by the saying ‘to walk a mile in someone else’s shoes’. Each footprint will be printed, stitched or painted onto pieces of fabric that will then be joined together to create a collective footprint. 

Three workshop sessions will be open to all ages and abilities, encouraging the local community to come along to create the footprints.

Holmewood Community Association will create a gallery of old memories in the local area for the launch of a new art hub in Holmewood. The images will be collated by older residents submitting their images, which will be blown up and displayed in the new art centre.  

For the second half of the exhibition, Holmewood Community Association will provide disposable cameras to local young people and ask them to photograph a positive and a negative image. These will be used to hold future discussions. 

Ilkley Players Ltd will be putting on an 8x8x8 projection in addition to their normal Playhouse programme. The grant will be used to enhance the experience of the additional production, including pay for technicians, costuming and in creating a special ‘Magic Waiting’ lighting effect. 

TheISSE will be working with female Baji Bantams supporters to organise a pre match event showcasing Bangla music and culture to Bradford City FC, bringing the collective football community together at the Bradford City FC Community Foundation. South Asian women and their families will have the opportunity to share their culture with other fans and then enjoy the match day. 

Krylati will be holding a festival at the Bradford Ukrainian Centre to mark 100 years since for formation of the Ukrainian Youth Association in Ukraine. It will incorporate singing and dancing as well as inviting members of other communities to come and learn Ukrainian dancing. 

Lister Community Action project are deepening connections between The Lister Community Gallery, Temple Street Gallery and The Ginnel Gallery, by creating a ‘Lister Art Trail’. Over the course of 12 months, they will be hosting six artist and exhibition trails that showcase artwork by current and former residents. One of the key objectives of the project includes extending the trail to Cartwright Hall and invite visitors from the gallery to explore art embedded in the daily life of Manningham.

They will also hold an annual ‘Art in Windows’ event, where residents and local businesses will be invited to display art in their windows to create a vibrant and accessible street gallery. 

Loosely Bound and Bradford Sketch Club will host a one-off workshop called Imagine Zine Space. It will be a daylong event for zine and art making, with activities that include: 

• A community zine using photos sent in from people’s phones and making it into a long zine, up to two meters. 

• Sketchclub XXL, which will be a space for people to sketch, draw or write what they like. Everything created by the participants will then be printed into a zine. 

• Let’s Get Physical (and Digital), a podcast about the Bradford Zine Scene. They will interview and profile local zinesters, and talk to them about why they make zines. 

Let’s Get Physical (and Digital) are planning to make a physical zine to accompany the podcast, which will be published for Bradford Zine Fair 2025. 

Mindfulness Girls will run self-love workshops for girls, centred around culture, religion, family, friends and communities, represented by a large banner they will create. The girls will also be given their own plain t-shirts to design around the theme of “Who I am”. 

Mixed Collective will collect a list of Bradford words and phrases of encouragement and camaraderie used by local communities. These will then be laser cut into durable stencils and sprayed on pavements around the district in colourful temporary chalk. 

Nebula Girls Group will put on a production called ‘This is Me’, performed by autistic young people. It will include singing, dancing, playing instruments, poetry recital and videos created for this project amongst other talents that the young people involved will share. This event will show that autistic young people have lots to give when offered the right support. T-shirts will be printed with Nebula Girls Group and Bradford 2025’s logos for those taking part in the show.  

This will be a free event and will provide paid work to some of the group’s 18+ cohort, who are currently unemployed and/or seeking work. 

Our Legacy plan to host an event bringing in a professional poet to help local young people express their emotions and lived experiences through poetry. An open mic night organised by the young people will take place afterwards, with parents, carers, friends and local community members invited to listen to the young people’s poems, showing others how to project negative emotions into something positive. 

The Queensbury Singers with 5-6 other choirs from Bradford will busk at key locations in the local village throughout the day before holding a free, open-air concert in the afternoon with a mass sing along with the Black Dyke Band. 

Queer South Asian Cafe will host a queer sangheet at Common Space that is open to all. Led by queer South Asian people, they will deliver a queer sangheet and immerse attendees in what a queer South Asian wedding would look like. People will have the opportunity to imagine what it would look like for their culture to celebrate them and even be transported back to moments of joy they have already had.  

Queer South Asian Cafe hope that this experience will be affirming or help others to recognise how their culture can be used to imagine a new future and way of being. 

Routes to Roots are creating an exhibition around the theme of South Asian migration and settlement stories to challenge assumptions and stereotypes that this community faces. The exhibition will spotlight the history of South Asian women and their relationships with Bradford. It will share the diversity of experience with South Asian communities and address the lack of representation of South Asian history within Bradford archives and historical collections. Routes to Roots will also showcase a documentary to communicate the experiences captured in this project. 

Sandale Community Development Trust will host a fun day event to bring the community together, with opportunities to take part in various arts and culture activities. This includes singing, dancing, cooking, crafts, music, food and more! They are providing an opportunity for their local community to showcase their talents, when they may not previously have had a chance to. 

Sapgate Gardens Association are hosting lantern making workshops and a shadow puppets event, to create a legacy around the lantern parade and shadow puppets on the Gardens in the Winter. They will be working with South Square Centre, the Community centre and the local school. 

SEND Salaam working with Summat Creative are organising a sensory art session for children with disabilities like autism, ADHD and other sensory needs, in the Girlington area. Their aim is to make art accessible for families from ethnic minority groups and engage children with additional needs. The theme of the session is culture and identity. Families will be asked to bring one item that represents their child’s interest / culture to use as the foundation for the main activity. 

Shipley Memories Group will be organising a mini festival during the Summer of 2025 for residents in the Shipley and Saltaire area, who are living with the early stages of Dementia. The event will showcase local musicians from across Bradford district. 

TCC Kids Art Club will be running a street art workshop and a photography workshop for children and young people. The street art session will involve painting a mural on a boarded-up shop to celebrate Bradford 2025 UK City of Culture, designed and created by the young people involved. The photography session will be a reflection on Craig Sugden’s montage film of local residents during the pandemic.

The children and young people will create an updated version of the project, then merge the two videos and reflect on the changes between them. They will work alongside a professional photographer, who will guide them through the creative process. 

Terne Caja will be creating a Romani flash-mob to be performed in City Park during July 2025. It will include those working at Connecting Roma as well as other local groups they are working with. They have been working together to learn the dance and plan logistics since January 2025. The performance will also be professionally recorded to be shared at a later date. 

The ‘Art Moves Kids’ Project will be bringing children and young people together to create brightly painted sculptures made from upcycled bike and scooter parts to celebrate the joy of scooting and cycling. The sculptures will then be displayed at Saltaire and Shipley Primary Schools, as well as being visible from the public footpath for the local community to enjoy. Both sculptures will be made from upcycled materials and at their end of life will both be fully recyclable. 

Both primary schools will paint the sculpture elements as a part of their art classes. The metalwork will be done by students from a local secondary school as part of their Design & Technology studies. The bicycle and scooter parts are being donated by Upcycle, a Shipley-based charity that supports people to build resilience and skills to prevent people from being pulled into crime. 

The City Gent Fanzine will be producing an A1 size piece of artwork made up of their front covers from the past 40 years. A small community exhibition will be created with the outputs and will be displayed in Heaton. 

The Sharing Tree will be hosting a pop up Gallery in the Garden. Weekly art sessions will be delivered by the staff from Mind the Gap, where participants will work with parents and their children to teach them about creating visual art. The art created in these workshops will then feature in the garden as a pop-up gallery event. The Sharing Tree hope to bring art to people who have the least access to it in their community. 

Thornbury Community Development Services are hosting eight workshops and a recording studio session with focus on reflection on life experiences and future challenges. With influence from Islamic Sufi poets, participants will discover themselves through sharing ideas and stories.

TCDS will be partnering with local nasheed artists and groups to deliver these sessions as well as to encourage and inspire the young people involved to pursue a positive and culturally significant hobby. This project will then culminate in a small community event, celebrating the things that the participants have created. 

ToNE will be organising a traditional Tamil folk dance called Kummi Aattam, for a cultural display festival. The dance is rooted in Tamil Nadu’s cultural heritage and is performed primarily by South Asian women. It symbolises unity, community and celebration. 

The group intend for this performance to bring more awareness to Tamil cultural traditions and provide an opportunity for the community to come together and celebrate. It will help preserve and promote this traditional dance form and foster a deeper understanding of Tamil culture. 

Topic Folk Club will facilitate a song writing workshop to bring Bradford-based people together in writing songs for their project, ‘Songs with a Bradford Accent’. They aim to have a diverse group of people to write songs about their community and the places they experience. The workshop will take place on a Saturday and will be facilitated by an experienced songwriter. Songs in languages other than English will be welcomed. 

Village Pavillion will set up a vending machine that sells mini artworks called The Art Vending Machine. They will use a second-hand vending machine, that they will rebrand to advertise the art of the local artists featured. It will be placed at various locations around Ilkley and users will be able to enter their coin (£1 max) to receive a small artwork in return. All profits will be split between the artists involved. 

Bingley Ukulele Group will be running a day of music making, running beginners’ sessions and workshops for more experienced players. They will purchase 10 ukuleles to run the beginners’ sessions. After the day of activities, they will be holding a concert  to showcase local ukulele groups and performers, then lend out the purchased ukuleles to local schools at no cost. They plan for this to develop into an annual event. 

Bradford Black and Brown Queers will organise a festival called Queer Joy, which will be a gathering of like-minded QTIPOC to socialise in a safe space. There are currently no single QTIPOC safe spaces in Bradford and BBBQ believe it is time to make one! 

Equity Partnership are planning a LGBTQ+ History month event to take place on 15th February, planned in collaboration with their members and Bradford Museums and Galleries. The funding allows them to host an engaging aerobics class at Cartwright Hall with Queerobics. They will also host a panel discussion focussing on LGBTQ+ representation in sport as a part of this event. The panel will feature Brinny from Queerobics, Zoe Boyd from Queer Self Defences and members of Bradford Baddies women and non-binary football team. 

They will host an exhibition of artwork created by Equity Partnership members in response to the Government Collection exhibition in Cartwright Hall, opening in Jan 2025. There will be curator talks on the heritage projects, ‘Queering the Museum’ and ‘Queer Dreaming’, alongside creative workshops run by a freelance artist. 

Burley Arts Collective will be hiring spaces for their performances and exhibitions. 

Redbeck Allotment Association will bring in an artist to teach a willow weave workshop. This will help the group and community learn more creative ways of using their large willow hedge on site. They also plan to create willow sculptures to attach to the perimeter of their fence and enhance the green corridor in their local area. Plot holders will be invited to the workshops and the group will also offer a family willow activity at the Apple Day at Shipley Fields Orchards in October. 

Addingham Allotments & Gardens Association will be running an Open Gardens across Addingham village on 21st and 22nd June 2025. The residents will be coming together to invite the public into their gardens, with all proceeds of the event going to Sue Ryder Manorlands Hospice. The event will also include live music events in the gardens, an art exhibition featuring local artists and mosaicist, who will also run demonstrations about their artistic medium. There will also be craft workshops from a local environmental group as well as a demonstration from a local resident, who makes musical instruments out of rocks. 

Harden Players will be putting on a play called Heroes, which is a prequel to their last play, ‘Shine’. Through this, they will champion and celebrate local talent in their community and the event will be in conjunction with the Bradford 2025 programme. 

Ravenscliffe Youth centre will run art-based workshops with young people to create a piece of visual artwork, that will represent what Bradford means to them. The finished piece will then be displayed within the youth centre. 

FUNdraising 4U will be putting on an interactive Bob Marley celebration event, that will run on either his birthday or his day of passing. The event will enable people from all communities and backgrounds to perform their favourite Bob Marley songs to a live audience and an opportunity to sing with live musicians. 

Happy Healthy You will produce a heartfelt short film, directed by a Rohingya Refugee who found solace in a local men’s exercise group. The project will showcase how physical activity and being part of a community organisation became a lifeline for him, contributing positively to his mental health and inspired him to volunteer to support others through football sessions. 

The film will explore the profound mental and emotional benefits of community-driven fitness and will celebrate the power of intergenerational and intercultural friendships. It will also highlight how exercise can break down barriers as well as fostering unity. 

Carers Resource will offer two sessions of willow weaving to unpaid carers in Bradford District, which will then be displaced to raise awareness of unpaid carers. They hope to display these art works during Carers Week in June 2025 and on Carers Rights Day in November 2025. 

Friends of Heaton Community Orchard working with Fruitworks will run a public ‘apple day’ event in September or October 2025 at the orchard. Their volunteers will run a range of creative activities alongside apple pressing activities including: 

• Nature art (mobiles for the trees) 

• Heaton Songwriters, who will perform through the day 

• Apple Stories (children will pick an apple from the story tree and a volunteer will tell the apple related story) 

• Campfire toffee apples