Sheffield Community Land Trust

Our Live Project team has been working in collaboration with Sheffield Community Land Trust to help them increase their membership and consolidate their aims as they move into the next exciting stage of their organisation.

A Community Land Trust (CLT) is a not-for-profit organisation made up of ordinary people, with the aim of providing genuinely affordable, secure housing and social amenities. Recognising the issue of empty and dilapidated buildings within our city centre, Sheffield Community Land Trust aims to retrofit these buildings into community-led sustainable homes.

Having secured funding for a feasibility study, the Founding Board of the Trust is moving the organisation forward quickly. Our primary objective as a Live Project team has been to support this by increasing public engagement and sharing CLT values, to ensure the community is involved at every stage.

During the initial phase of our 6-week collaboration, we refined the brief with the SCLT board and conducted internal best practice research. Through interviews and visits with successful CLTs (Granby Four Streets and Yor Space), we gathered valuable insights that informed the rest of our project.

Inspired by our visit to Granby, we developed our presence in the City Centre through guerrilla gardening and street cleaning on The Moor. This led up to our first public workshop at Live Works, designed to test public participation through different activities.

We experimented with various types of models which were used to show the concept of retrofitting and shared facilities. Interactive posters were created to collect the public’s thoughts on the city centre, and seed cards and flower pots were given out to help people green their environment. This workshop acted as a valuable testbed for further public engagement and allowed us to refine our outputs before the main event at Union Street Cafe.

Credits

Student Team: 

Quincy Qiao Yi Lo, Ayako Seki, Camlo Sheppard, Hannah Spiers, Aidan Stevens, Mia Deaville, Connor Curley, Lewis Endersby, Harry Lord, Chien-Ping Hu, Shiwei Huang, Nan Zhang

Mentor:

Sam Brown