Platt Hall Values
Our focus is on building relationships and working in partnership – with residents and participants, with partner organisations and groups, with Manchester City Council departments. We work at the pace of trust to develop foundational and authentic relationships of mutual benefit. We strive to be open and transparent about where, when and how decisions are made, sharing the decision-making when it’s possible and being clear why we can’t when it’s not.
WHY?
Because being embedded in wider networks contributes to communities that are bigger than the sum of their parts. It protects and supports the work, brings complementary skills and expertise into play, tests new ways of working for wider benefit, and puts our unique skills and resources to work in new ways and environments. It builds understanding, value and advocacy for the potential of culture to improve lives. And it builds shared investment in, understanding of, and belonging in Platt Hall.
We work in the wards of Rusholme, Moss Side, Fallowfield and Longsight, embedding the Hall within the neighbourhood in which it sits, and being a ‘good neighbour’ to our community. Our programmes invest in local people and serve their needs, reflect and celebrate diverse cultures, enhance the neighbourhood, instill pride and tell good stories about it to the wider world. It doesn’t mean only working with local people but it does mean always planning in terms of benefit to the local neighbourhood.
WHY?
Because the Hall belongs first and foremost to the people who live here. And to protect it in the longer term, it needs local people to love it, invest in it, advocate for it. We want the Hall to be so useful and integral a part of the neighbourhood that it can’t do without it. It’s about addressing the real and specific needs of a neighbourhood that has both richness of culture and the challenge of deprivation, through the care and continuity that local relationships can provide.
We promote the concept of everyday creativity as ‘the expression and innovation we bring to all aspects of our lives’. As part of a creative arts organisation we are all about the role of creativity in a healthy society. But at Platt Hall we focus on developing and supporting everyday creativity: ‘small-c’ creative acts, experiences and expressions that spark joy, foster resilience and promote self-esteem and personal agency.
WHY?
Because everyday creativity is a life well-lived. It supports people to express themselves, understand themselves, communicate themselves. It develops confidence, builds social and cultural capital, leads to new pathways and prospects. It’s within reach, democratic, accessible. Collectively it’s a way of sharing ideas, getting involved, coming together and problem solving. It’s art woven into daily life, breaking down barriers of privilege, fear and exclusivity, broadening the definitions of what creativity is. It’s domestic, approachable, intimate and ordinary, is manifest through the collections held at Platt and in the domestic scale and history of the building. It belongs here.