Connecting Pollok: Past, Present & Future
Connecting Pollok: Past, Present & Future is a community-led project supporting inclusion, connection and resilience throughout Greater Pollok. The project focussed on connecting greenspaces and community assets, breaking down barriers, widening access to participation and developing community ownership.
The Book
The Connecting Pollok: Past, Present & Future book brings together over 25 stories by community members of all ages, exploring the history of activism in the community and fond memories of Pollok’s past, celebrating people and places across the community as it is now and imagining the future story of Pollok as a thriving creative community. The book is a celebration of the amazing work achieved by the Citizen Storytellers – an intergenerational cohort of local people recruited in early 2024 to gather, shape, collate and share local stories in collaboration with The Village Storytelling Centre and key partners.
Born To Be Wild
‘Born To Be Wild’ was a storytelling and arts project within The Connecting Pollok Project, working with a nurture group at St. Paul’s High School in Pollok. This project connected the pupils with the 30th year anniversary of the Pollok Free State (on their door step!) We have been using a lens of ‘past, present and future’ and focusing specially on the role of young people with in the PFS, such as school strikes and youth involvement in the camp through to discussing what activism today might look like as the pupils reflect on the relationship they have to Damshot woods, an annex of Pollok Park that is used by the school as an outdoor classroom for nurture. The group interviewed 4 people who were leaders of the PFS or who were teenagers at the time and they wrote their own reflective responses in the form of poetry and spoken word. The results were a podcast created by the group and a zine.
We are very grateful to our funders, Inspiring Scotland, for supporting this project through their Creative Communities Glasgow programme.
