The Synergy Centre, London

In July 2005, Indigenous People and Kakatsitsi were instrumental in setting up a new venture in the deprived South London community of Camberwell – the Synergy Centre. Moving into a large disused clothing warehouse, they and a growing community of fellow artists have transformed the space into a thriving local cultural and creative facility, providing low-cost facilities for an economically disadvantaged yet culturally rich local community.

Camberwell and the neighbouring communities of Brixton and Peckham have the highest concentration of African people in the UK, including a prominent Ghanaian community. Remittances from these diasporan African represent an important source of finance repatriated to Ghana to support families and promote economic development. The Synergy Centre, as well as acting as a base for the Kakatsitsi drummers, also supports a Black/African theatre company, Collective Artistes, five African churches and has hosted the ‘Hidden Histories’ project – a cultural education project exploring Black British and African history and heritage as well as a development education project in partnership with the British Youth Council.  The centre is currently running ‘The Synergy Youth Project’ – a series of after-school workshops in music technology, dance (fusing traditional African with UK street styles), African drumming and drama.

The Project, which is funded by the Southwark Youth Offending Team, seeks to divert local young people away from anti-social and criminal lifestyles, giving them constructive and creative outlets for their energies. The Centre is soon to establish a Synergy Youth Council, which will offer local young people a forum in which to discuss local, national and international social, cultural and environmental issues so as to encourage them to become more active and engaged citizens. The Council will also facilitate exchange projects between South London and other European countries as well as with youth projects in the developing world, with a view to raising the young participants’ awareness of their responsibilities as global citizens.

In addition to housing and supporting Kakatsitsi, the Synergy Centre is also the base of Ghanaian artist Jerry Blankson, who recently participated in an exhibition at the prestigious Victoria and Albert Museum to commemorate the 50^th anniversary of Ghanaian independence.

The Synergy Centre has a strong track record in the use of creative media and social gatherings to act as outreach and informal education tools to raise awareness of social, cultural, environmental and spiritual issues. Between 2002 and 2007, The Synergy Project (www.thesynergyproject.org), founded by Indigenous People director and manager of Kakatsitsi - Steve Peake, held large indoor festivals at one of London’s largest club venues that bring together DJs, musicians and performers with campaigners from non-governmental organisations such as Oxfam, Actionaid and Greenpeace to promote sustainable and ethical lifestyles. It regularly attracted in excess of 2,000 young people aged 18-40, many of whom have an interest in issues relating to social justice, the environment and the cultures and traditions of other countries and peoples.

The Synergy Centre in London seeks to replicate the success of the Synergy Project in providing employment for over 200 young people per event as well as offering an entertaining and educational experience to a large and growing fan-base in the less socio-economically privileged community of West Camberwell. It particularly seeks to act as a beacon of best practice in inspiring people from Black and Ethnic Minority communities to harness the economic potential of their diverse creative and cultural traditions to provide employment and opportunity in London’s massive creative and cultural economy, thereby giving them a means of tackling the social exclusion and disadvantage they often experience. The centre also serves to act as a social and cultural hub, where people of different backgrounds can gather, network, exchange experiences and ideas so as to promote social cohesion and cross-cultural understanding, thereby strengthening the social fabric and promoting social, economic and cultural regeneration.

The annual turnover of the Synergy Centre in London has increased from £50,000 (2005-6), to £70,000 (2006-7) to an £225,000 (2007-8). The monthly cost-structure is currently £9000, £5300 of which covers rent.

The Centre has a variety of income streams, including daytime rentals to professional theatre and other performance companies, after-school projects for local young people (funded by the local authority, central government or other funders), weekday evening workshops, weekend rentals to churches and other groups and a strong events based income stream which hires the venue to local families or event managers or hosts in-house events themed on topical social, cultural or spiritual issues.

The London team is in the process of applying to the Myplace fund at the Big Lottery Fund, a scheme which enables youth projects to invest in buildings and equipment. The scheme reopens for application in spring 2009 and will take approximately 12 months to assess applications. If successful, the London Synergy Centre will be able to reduce their costs by £5300 a month, enabling it to invest in more staff in London but also to begin investing in the development of the proposed Ghana Synergy Centre.

Local Knowledge and Experience

Since 1994, Steve Peake, Manager of Kakatsitsi and Director of Indigenous People and the Synergy Centre (London) has visited Ghana numerous times, living and working in the communities of Old Accra. In 2005, he spent 2 months in Accra working on a recording and filming project funded by the Arts Council of England, culminating in the production of a film ‘Hiplife and the Ga Tradition’, starring local rapper Papa Rowe and Numo Tettey III, the High Priest of the Ga people. Steve is well known and respected in the local community and through his close contacts in the Ga Royal Family and with local people, he has excellent access to local traditional leaders, youth workers and young people. Having worked closely with Mr Samuel Ashong, assistant director at the Accra Centre for National Culture, who acted as assistant tour manager on the 2002 Kakatsitsi UK Tour and now acts as Ghana Manager of the group, Steve also has excellent contacts with and access to government officials and political leaders. 

12 years Kakatsitsi and Indigenous People have spent working to export traditional African culture overseas has revealed a number of important lessons to be learnt by those seeking to harness traditional culture as an economic resource.

•      Demand for traditional music in particular, and traditional African cultural goods and services in general, is very high in the West, with many people, particularly the young, turning to the cultures of ‘less developed’ societies for inspiration in their search for alternatives to the spiritual desert of western materialism. Demand for cultural educational services broadening children’s understanding of other cultures is particularly high, not least for the way they promote racial tolerance and an acceptance of cultural difference, valuable in increasingly cultural diverse western urban communities for the role they play in strengthening community cohesion.

•      The attraction and appeal of traditional culture is a powerful but underused marketing tool for tourism to Ghana, as Ghana has a particularly rich traditional cultural heritage, particularly in the traditional music, dance, spiritual, medicinal and historical sectors.

•      While Ghana has a particularly diverse and strong drumming heritage, the country lags behind other West African countries such as Senegal and the Gambia in the marketing and promotion of this heritage to attract tourists.

•      The popularity and use of Herbal Medicine in the West has experienced a massive growth over the last 10 years, not least as it is comparatively cheaper than pharmaceutical medicine and is seen by patients as being in harmony with nature and therefore resonating with the growing environmental consciousness in the West.

•      The Ghanaian traditional cultural sector receives little in the way of investment or management support in Ghana, due to the preference of indigenous investors and managers to support modern or popular cultural products or services. As a result, the wealth of talent in the traditional cultural sector is largely under-developed.

•     Tourism is one of the fastest growing sectors of the Ghanaian economy and, if managed ethically and sustainably – whereby all profits are directed towards developing the local communities surrounding a development – can be a powerful driving force to create employment and raise living standards in local communities. Indigenous Tourism, whereby the principal attraction is that of learning about the traditions and lives of the indigenous population, is a fast-growing sector of the tourism industry, in which Australia is the market leader, harnessing the global recognition of Aboriginal culture to market Australia to the world.

•      Ghana, with a strong tradition of peace and democracy, offers investors and development funders a stable environment in which to develop sustainable tourism projects focussing on traditional culture.

•      The Jamestown / Usshertown areas of Old Accra are amongst the least economically advantaged areas of Accra yet enjoy considerable traditional cultural wealth, being the home of the Nai, Sakumo, Korle and Dantu Wolomei, the site of the Gbese, Asere, Abola, Otublohum, Sempe, Akunmajay and Ngleshi Alata (Jamestown) Mantse Palaces, the sites of the Ussher and James Forts, the Lighthouse, Seaview Hotel and the Jamestown harbour.

Indigenous People have a strong track record in managing projects focussing on the export of Ghanaian traditional culture and a correspondingly high level of credibility in funding circles. Their management team are all graduates of the London School of Economics, one of the world’s foremost social science universities, and have 12 years experience setting up and running successful social enterprises in the creative, cultural and African music sectors. Having established a firm foundation of success in the UK, they are now keen to establish a base in Ghana, empowering local people to harness the economic potential of their traditional culture to promote sustainable development.

The proposed resource centre, prospectively to be based in the Usshertown / Jamestown area of Accra, would offer the following services.

•     Management School / Consultancy – providing training, hands on experience and on-going support for start up enterprises in the traditional cultural sector. The Centre will focus on providing local traditional cultural practitioners and artists with the necessary support to expand the local indigenous tourism sector, enabling them to benefit from growth in tourism in the local community and also by creating links between local manufacturers of traditional cultural products with wholesalers and retailers oversees.

•     Indigenous Tourism facility, hosting workshops and exhibitions in a wide variety of traditional cultural practices such as traditional drumming, dancing and singing, traditional religion, history and social studies. The emphasis of the facility will be to encourage interaction between visitors and the local people, rather than closeting them away in luxurious facilities isolated from contemporary Ghanaian social realities.

•     A volunteering facility, where socially and environmentally conscious westerners can work on a variety of projects to promote the social and environmental welfare of the surrounding community.

•     The centre will also offer facilities for groups of young people from disadvantaged communities in the UK, the EU and the EU periphery to visit Ghana on work experience and personal development youth exchange projects, working with local young people on environmental and community development projects.

•     Informal education projects for local young people raising vocational skills and awareness of local, national and international issues relating to the environment and development.

•     A community radio station with a broadcast radius of 2-3km, focussing on the development of local cultural talent, particularly amongst the young, assisting them with the acquisition of leadership and project management skills and facilitating the discussion of important social and cultural issues within the community.

•     A Jamestown Local Exchange and Trading System (LETS) – to promote local economic activity that would otherwise be obstructed by the relative lack of cash in the local economy (see below).

•     The new centre will be renovated so as to preserve the character of the building at the same time as integrating new techniques to make it as energy efficient as possible. A solar roof and a number of small wind turbines will ensure the building is self-sufficient in energy terms and will showcase cutting edge environmental technologies and their use in developing economies.

The true wealth of our communities lies in the skills and resources we have, not the amount of cash available. Local Exchange Trading Systems (LETS) are innovative trading networks in which people use a local currency to pay for goods and services offered by other members.

LETS schemes have achieved recognition as valuable and effective networks through which regeneration can be fostered. The ‘Community Enterprise – Good Practice Guide’, published by the UK Office of the Deputy Prime Minister describes their operation succinctly:

LETS schemes are a means of encouraging economic activity in an area by creating credit which members of the scheme can use as a currency when trading among each other. The units of account used usually equate to the Pound, although names are different, so that  prices and quotes will be familiar. The face value of Bricks used, for example, in a scheme in Brixton is 1 pound – if the going rate for a job is 10 pounds, the quote will be 10 bricks. The essential features of LETS are: 

•       A directory or bulletin board, which contains brief descriptions of offers and requirements which participants in the system wish to trade.

•       An accounting system which records transactions, crediting or debiting units to and from accounts.

•      Periodic statements to the LETS participants, listing their personal transactions and the balance of their account.

In some cases, payment for a service is in a mixture of LETS credits and money. A decorator may be prepared to have his LETS account credited for his labour, but will need cash to buy the materials.

LETS have the potential to combat social exclusion by offering residents of an area the opportunity to re-enter or enter the world of work on a small scale, building up their skills, self reliance and networks. Existing LETS are well used by unemployed people. For a partnership, there will be broader benefits in forms of re-cycling resources within the community, building capacity and community cohesion.

Local currencies, as history demonstrates, offer one of the most effective and immediate solutions in areas affected by high unemployment. Local currencies, based on sound economic practices of the past, enable people to carry on trading their goods and services locally, whether or not there is money.

A response to endemic unemployment, the economic decline experienced by many local communities in the West and the consequent shortage of money to facilitate economic activity, LETS are at the forefront of efforts to empower local communities in the post-industrial West to find solutions to the social and economic challenges they face. In many ways they are derived from local barter systems used in traditional ‘less developed’ societies.

Principles of non-profit are at the core of the system, as are those of community participation and accountability.  LETS are therefore invaluable tools in empowering local people to become economically and socially productive, evading the barriers of apathy and dejection experienced by many in the deprived and run-down areas of both the developing and developed worlds.

One of the principal advantages of the LETS scheme is that no interest is charged on a participant’s balance, overcoming many of the problems experienced by people when they need to borrow money and ensuring that the currency is only created by the trade of goods and services.  They are local, participatory and self-managed by the people they serve, ensuring that wealth is generated by and stays in the local community.

• Office Space – for use by centre staff and those of partner anisations working in Ghana with Indigenous People to promote economic development through indigenous tourism.
• Rehearsal and Performance Space for local traditional drumming and dance groups.
• Studio and Gallery Space for local visual artists to produce and exhibit their work.
• Beach-side dance floor, stage, cinema and bar – a large open space adjoining the beach with some shaded areas in which workshops / lectures / seminars for local people and visiting tourists can be held. 

TheThe proposed organisational / legal structure of the proposed centre is proposed to be divided into an entity that will own the asset of the building and the surrounding land and an operating company that

will manage the proposed centre and its activities.

Community Land Trust

It is proposed that a Community Land Trust (CLT) be set up, which will own the building and the land on behalf of the community. The land / buildings will therefore be held by the Trust in perpetuity and will not be liable to be sold out from under those who will be investing time and resources in developing it. Advice is required to ascertain what legal entity under Ghanaian law will best meet this need. The CLT will have a management board, with representation of all the major stakeholders in the project on the board. All members of the board will act in an unpaid capacity, although legitimate out-of-pocket expenses will be paid.

It is hereby proposed that the asset of the building and the beach-front be transferred to this proposed CLT and that rather than a payment being required to cover this transaction, all funds should be focussed on the renovation and development of the site and the provision of services and projects of benefit to the community.

The proposed structure for the operation of the building is a not-for-profit company (a company limited by guarantee under /span> UK la law). The OC will manage the building and will oversee the delivery of projects and services run underneath its umbrella. The underlying ethos of the OC will be to facilitate and broker partnerships with the various other organisations running projects at the Centre, acting as an enabling, empowering, advisory and supervisory body for partners rather than necessarily seeking to operate all the services and projects itself. The OC will be run by a Centre Manager, who will be accountable to a board of trustees who will meet monthly.