Meet the Makers & Maintainers: Trinity Community Arts
Trinity Community Arts is one of ten community businesses funded by the Power To Change Makers & Maintainers programme, which supports community businesses who are already on a journey of creating community tech – technology that can meet their specific needs, respects their autonomy and creates value that sticks to places.
Meet Trinity Community Arts
Trinity Community Arts is an award-winning arts charity established to manage The Trinity Centre. Trinity has a long tradition as a community hub and music venue, using creative participation and cultural engagement as a vehicle for social change.
Trinity supports over 55 grassroots community partners such as arts organisations, community groups and voluntary-led organisations who use The Trinity Centre to increase access to cultural activities. Collectively, they work with participants who may be experiencing a range of complex needs including social isolation, physical and mental health issues, challenging circumstances, access needs and language barriers.
In 2021/22, Trinity engaged almost 45,000 people through over 1,200 events and activities. Their locally rooted, multi-disciplinary arts programme helps to increase opportunities for people to lead creative, culturally active and fulfilling lives. This extends from art clubs and music programmes for disadvantaged children and young people, cultural programmes to connect and elevate under-represented voices, and supporting new and diverse talent. For example, paid artist residencies for dance practitioners working in non-traditional arts spaces such as Southmead Hospital.
Photo Credit: Khali Ackford. Black Creatives Gala for Chris Kaba
How Trinity Community Arts is creating and using community tech
All of Trinity’s work is co-designed with their communities of artists, audiences and participants. It is vital that they are each able to demonstrate their community reach and the impact of their activities. Often, this is a prerequisite of their funding, as well as an essential ingredient in realising their public benefit.
It is challenging for Trinity to collect and monitor data across the breadth of the communities they engage with, which may include people who attend The Trinity Centre as audience gig goers, weekly participants in training and classes, or by coming along to an ad-hoc workshop. Some community groups who deliver activities at The Trinity Centre may struggle to collect any data at all due to barriers experienced by capacity and technology access - and even when it is possible, the learning is not always redistributed to participants in a democratic way.
The Trinity team has taken matters into its own hands to address this challenge, making use of open source customer relationship management software, CiviCRM, to effectively gather impact and monitoring data.
However, CiviCRM is not universally accessible or fit for purpose for all of Trinity’s programmes of activity, which may happen off-site or without user registration. And there may be other barriers, for example, language or age.
Makers & Maintainers funding will enable the Trinity team to co-create solutions to bridge this gap, as well as to further automate and streamline CiviCRM’s reporting functions, reducing need for manual data extraction and administrative costs related to documentation of community-based projects.
The team hope to work with developers to create free-to-access software, and community organisations will be able to access this through a new, customisable web app. In the first instance, this will be tested by partners who are already delivering regular activities at the centre. The web app will integrate with CiviCRM, allowing Trinity to capture and manage participant data and strengthen the fundraising and resilience of groups through better monitoring and reporting.
The community source code will also be openly shared for wider community benefit, which is vital to Trinity’s vision:
“Using open source software enables us to take ownership of the platforms we use whilst also giving back to communities or smaller organisations who may not have the income to afford other alternative software.”
Adam Gallacher, Deputy CEO
How community tech is strengthening local communities
Alongside developing the software itself, Trinity will also be collaborating with community stakeholders to explore how users can take back ownership of data and use it for the benefit of local communities.
“The tech grant allows us to rethink how communities could take back ownership of their data whilst also investing in the open source community.”
Sarah Bentley, Trinity Community Arts
Photo credit Sophie Stella. Garden Party, Trinity Community Arts
The technology will be developed in partnership with key community groups – this includes voluntary-led organisations across special educational needs and disability (SEND), children and young people, mental health and wellbeing groups, as well as health and community consortia.
The benefits for these groups and participants working and living locally are: an increased ability to share in the creation and use of a web app that collects, stores and reports on data that is democratic for all end users, as well as increased autonomy for users to manage their own data. For community groups, it will generate benefits such as easier reporting, and reduced costs through use of open source technologies.
Trinity hopes that the new technology will also enable grassroots and advocacy organisations to access data to help shape change for their local community and raise the voices of people who may otherwise not be heard.
Find out more about the programme
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