Work With Us
We can work with you to design bespoke creative projects and processes that respond to your needs. We will start by gaining a thorough understanding of your intentions and objectives, and work with you and other project partners or participants to co-design an event or programme that challenges and inspires all those involved to come together to explore new ideas and learn together.
Encounters has 16 years experience of project delivery across a broad sweep of subject areas, working with a wide range of commissioners, partners and stakeholders. However, we have significant expertise and a particular interest in expanding our work in the areas highlighted below.
If you are looking to deliver a complex, challenging, multi-faceted project or programme within these areas in a sensitive, creative, participant-led and solution-focused way, we can help. We can also offer a range of tried and tested ‘Off the Shelf’ interventions to engage and inspire at one-off events or through short-term engagements.
Climate Emergency and Ecological Limits
Encounters offer bespoke programmes of outreach and engagement, enabling communities to come together and explore in depth responses and solutions to the climate and ecological emergency we are in. Working with activities designed to engage head, hearts and hands, we can support you to give your community the confidence to move forward together in the face of this complex challenge.
You can see recent examples of our work in this field here.
Our current ‘Off the Shelf’ offers:
- Climate Emergency Offer Flyer PDF
- Totnes Climate Action Plan PDF
- Town Anywhere (to come)
Care and Wellbeing
Encounters has experience of working with both commissioners and service users to explore key wellbeing questions such as ‘What does Good Care Look like?’ and ‘What do you need to Age Well?’. These types of open questions can form the basis of a creative stake-holder engagement process, or be used as to stimulate staff training or service redesign. A more sustained programme of Creative Consultation can result in significant improvements to the service user experience, or change at a systemic, service-wide level. For example, an innovative project with residents, families and staff across a number of Residential Care homes in Torbay resulted in the production of a co-created ‘Residents Charter of Rights’ which gives voice to the needs and wants of patients and relatives using residential care services in the area.
You can see recent examples of our work in this field here.
Our current ‘Off the Shelf’ offer:
Place
Encounters has a long history of working intimately and in depth within diverse geographical communities across the UK, and are specialists in bringing people, place and planet together through creative, transformative projects, which often produce co-designed solutions to issues impacting on local communities. We are highly skilled at working with all kinds of people and, using our well-respected methodology of ‘invitations’ to join in, have a high rate of success in engaging those in the community who may be perceived as ‘hard to reach’ or have been traditionally under-represented in public dialogue.
You can see recent examples of our work in this field here.
Our ability to deliver Place related work in any geographical community has been strengthened through the development of our co-designed and co-built mobile gathering space, Chrysalis. Chrysalis is a specially converted vehicle that can reach and connect with people in a wide range of rural and urban spaces, and has (so far!) been used as an exhibition venue, workshop space, festival hub, meeting room and performance space.
You can find out more about Chrysalis here.
If you are interested in hiring Chrysalis (with or without a driver or a member of the Encounters Team) you can find out more here:
Methods and Approaches
You can find out more about our ethos and approach on the How We Work and Participatory Practice pages, and browsing our case studies will give you a really good introduction to how Encounters works. Particular areas of expertise include:
Creative Consultation, Engagement and Visioning
Encounters creatively facilitates the coming together of diverse people to engage in conversations, to share their experiences and stories, read case studies.
Co-design
We can help you and your group to co-design imaginative projects to better respond to the challenges of our time and your community, click for case studies.
Training
Encounters can resource you, your communities and organisations with creative tools for change, We can offer bespoke training as part of wider work with you, enabling you to embed learning more widely. Our popular Art of Invitation Training focuses on developing skills in creative engagement and can be run as a bespoke course in collaboration with you, or you can attend an existing course hosted with one of our partner organisations (details of current course can be found here) or visit Stir To Action for courses being delivered in partnership with Stir To Action.
You can find out more about our Art of Invitation training here or download our flyer here:
"Encounters do something remarkable, something precious, they create invitational spaces in which people feel comfortable to relate to each other and to ideas in a very different way. I don't know anyone else who brings the care, love, attention to detail and passion to what they do."
Rob Hopkins, Transition Network
