Christopher Mike, Founder of Art in the Docks

What does your charity do?

Art in the Docks is a community arts charity based in the Royal Docks area of east London. We bring people together through creative health, education, cultural and place activation programmes. These are designed to improve wellbeing, strengthen communities and create opportunities for local people to participate in the arts. Working with residents, schools, businesses and public partners, we use creativity to help build a more connected, confident and inclusive community.

What are the challenges your service users face, and how does your organisation help users overcome them?

Many of the people we work with face barriers that are often interconnected. These include social isolation, poor mental wellbeing, financial hardship, limited access to cultural opportunities, and a lack of confidence in their own creative abilities. These challenges are compounded by rapid, but unequal regeneration, leaving some residents feeling disconnected from the changes taking place around them and uncertain about where they belong within their own neighbourhood.

Art in the Docks helps to address these challenges by creating welcoming, accessible opportunities for people to come together through creativity. Our programmes provide safe and inclusive spaces where residents can build confidence, develop new skills, form social connections and engage with the cultural life of their community. Whether through creative health activities, family arts sessions, school projects or community events, we use creativity as a practical tool to improve wellbeing, strengthen community ties and create a greater sense of belonging.

Our partnership with ELBA plays an important role in this work. Through ELBA, we have enabled corporate volunteers to contribute their time, skills and resources to community related projects. Whether making lanterns for a community parade, or painting birdboxes to go into a community garden, these collaborations have supported activities ranging from environmental and placemaking initiatives to creative workshops and skills-sharing opportunities, helping to expand what we can offer whilst creating meaningful connections between local communities and the business sector.

Together, these activities help residents to feel more connected, more confident and more invested in the place they call home, whilst ensuring that CSR volunteers can directly connect the result of their activities to positive social outcomes.

Do you have an inspirational story/moment about your work that you would like to share?

In the last twelve months, with support from ELBA, we have been able to deliver five separate community parades engaging over 1,250 Royal Docks residents. In an area characterised by first generation immigration, diversity and deprivation, these events instil a sense of belonging, community and civic pride. Above all, they create a sense of hope.

What kind of support are you in need of right now and how might volunteering fit into that?

We are surrounded by multiple primary schools where arts and cultural provision falls well short of any acceptable standard. Schools that are unable to support the costs of externally provided provision simply go without. Our ‘Mission Possible’ programme sets out to remedy this; we would love to work with an organisation that sees the value of working in school settings to elevate young people’s life chances.