Delivery partner spotlight: Everyday Wigan

Everyday is Wigan’s leading participatory arts organisation, providing support to children and young people to develop creative skills, express their emotions and find their voice. Working in collaboration with AllChild, Everyday has delivered essential support to children and young people

By Hannah Robinson-Smith, Chief Executive Officer at Everyday

Everyday delivers cultural education and creative health and wellbeing-focused programming and activity across the borough of Wigan, in schools, community venues, and at our home base.

We provide artistic development opportunities through work experience and placements for those not in education, employment or training, and training emerging artists in socially engaged practice.

Everyday has been in Wigan over 10 years now, in various guises. We have four employed staff who are all northern, working-class women, with multiple neurodivergences – and masses of passion and skills! We utilise a network of incredible freelance artists on lots of our projects. Talented illustrator and socially engaged artist facilitator Kelly Ma, alongside alongside our Creative Delivery Lead, Emily Calland led at two of the four schools on our recent murals project.

We work collaboratively and in partnerships, planning and delivering excellent opportunities in high-quality art forms, in places that people most need it, covering all of Greater Manchester. We’ve worked in AllChild schools in Wigan for over two years now and are excited to venture into Salford this year!

We deliver exciting artistic opportunities to those most often excluded from the arts. We wholeheartedly believe that working class people deserve access to high-quality experiences, opportunities, and activities. Arts, culture and creativity is our passion, and we bring joy, learning, and positive creative health to our communities wherever we work.

And with AllChild, that work is in some of the most socio-economically disadvantaged neighbourhoods in our country.

Schools, and all public services, are under so much pressure following years of austerity and cuts. There’s increased pressure on budgets, plus raised stakes and accountability measures mean they just can’t meet the needs of their young people alone. There’s have books to balance, targets coming out of their ears, and the wider wellbeing of young people isn’t monitored like their academic progress is. It makes it so much easier for it to be forgotten or drop down the list for prioritisation.

This is where AllChild is different!

The schools we work in with AllChild have the needs and interests children and young people in mind at all times. The partnership model between AllChild, the schools, and Everyday as a Delivery Partner is the sweet spot for these young people.

We are the subject matter experts in creative health and wellbeing and participatory arts practice and target our work where the schools and the Link Workers feel it’ll have the most impact. We see that play out on a weekly basis – and over time too. In the schools we’ve been in since the start of their journey with AllChild two years ago, the progress of these young people is incredible to witnesses and we’re proud to have a been part of it.

That’s why our mural project with children coming to the end of their Impact Programme was so important to celebrate.

Celebrating their progress, enjoyment, and participation on this partnership programme has been an honour. And showcasing that journey through bright, bold, impactful public art is so visually and emotionally powerful for them, too.

To walk into their school corridor, dining hall, or outdoor space and see their own artwork, and the quotes they came up with in coproduction sessions. The artwork reminds them that ‘The World is Full of Colour!’, how they have built ‘resilience’, and worked ‘together’; how ‘It’s okay to make mistakes’ and to be themselves; and how ‘Every Child is an Artist [so we should] let [them] thrive in creativity!’.

That means so much, and it’s everything that Everyday is about.

To have helped these young people find their voice and express themselves through joyful colour, creativity, and their own incredibly powerful words, whilst supporting them to bond and collaborate in such a complex, and large scale project was really powerful for us too!

Let’s keep providing excellent and enjoyable artistic endeavour for everyone!

Together. Everyday. For AllChild(ren!).