Love Exploring Carnival Celebration

A partnership of colleagues from Culture, Active Leeds and Public Health in Leeds City Council has secured funding of £4,000 to deliver a project which will bring benefits to the city in terms of increasing levels of physical activity, promoting walking routes in areas including Chapeltown and Harehills, celebrating a Leeds cultural phenomenon, and developing a range of products to embed and showcase intergenerational story-telling.

We would like to invite Expressions of Interest from organisations in a position to deliver the project by August 2022. The deadline for Expressions of Interest is March 4 2022. This procurement process will need to complete by the end of March 2022.

The central focus of this project will be to engage with people who were involved in bringing the West Indian Carnival to Leeds. Working in co-production, primarily with a generation of people who can recall living in Leeds in the 1960s and 1970s, the objective will be to capture the stories of this generation, with a specific focus on Carnival – memories of making the event happen for the first time, highlights and stories about Carnival over the years, and recollections of the impact of Carnival when it first came to the city. Capturing archive video footage, photos and audio would be a key element of the project.

This material would be used primarily to develop a trail for the free-to-use Love Exploring app, to showcase the stories of the generation of people who brought Carnival to Leeds, and to provide a focal point for a walking trail around the route of Carnival.

More information about Love Exploring is available here.  

The Love Exploring trail should include audio stories sharing individuals’ lived experiences, as well as personal and city-owned archive material, and contemporary photos. It would broadly trace the route of Carnival, with around 10-15 waypoints along the way, starting and ending in Potternewton Park. Some of these waypoints will simply describe the route, while others will tell a story and describe the route. Training and support will be provided with uploading this content onto the app. The project should also include the creation of a landing page (potentially to be hosted on Leeds Inspired), which would link to the Love Exploring app and provide a forum for sharing the stories and archive material in more detail.

As this project will involve engaging directly with community members, there should also be scope within the funding allocation to gather insight and actualise suggestions from people who are taking part as co-producers. This could include (but not be limited to):

A video which tells the story of creating the Carnival route for Love Exploring
and
The gathering of insight into older people’s experiences of walking in the Chapeltown and Harehills area
Potential for small legacy improvements to the route, such as installing a bench or planting a tree, especially if this would make the route more age-friendly

Please contact Sally.Hall4@leeds.gov.uk (Public Health specialist) to discuss this further, or to submit an Expression of Interest.