The Work Came First: Launching Cugoano Changemakers through Changemaker Lens

It was thirty-one degrees on Tuesday 26 May, one of the hottest days of the year, and still the church filled.

More than twenty young artists, all of them under thirty, had work on the walls of St James’s Church, Piccadilly that evening. Most had travelled in from across the UK to be there. The trains were a mess. People came anyway.

I had been worried that the heat and the transport would stop people coming. Some people could not make the journey in the end, which was a real shame, but the room still filled. Artists arrived carrying canvases, textiles, film, sound and words. Families came. Friends came. People stayed.

This was the launch of the Cugoano Changemaker Programme, and we chose to launch it through the Changemaker Lens. Not through a panel, but through the work: work made by young artists, many of whose names may not yet be widely known. We did this on purpose.

The programme is named after Quobna Ottobah Cugoano, baptised in this church in 1773, who wrote some of the most uncompromising arguments against slavery in English. We wanted his programme to begin the way he had worked: through honest, careful, deliberate voice.

Lens is the creative and storytelling pillar of the programme. It sits alongside Circles, the in-person learning days where the cohort meets to think and work together, and Continuum, the funded projects Changemakers design and deliver in the second half of the programme. Lens puts the perspective and the eye of young people at the centre. It asks one question of every piece: what is this story for, and who does it serve?

Marwah and I had spent a long time trying to explain Changemaker Lens on paper. We knew what we meant, but it was hard to make it fully land in words. It needed to be experienced. On Tuesday evening, it became something people could walk through, stop beside, talk about and feel for themselves.

You could see that question working on Tuesday’s walls.

We had met many of the artists in workshops before the exhibition, so the work did not arrive as something distant or anonymous. We had heard some of their stories, their questions and the care behind what they were making. Seeing it all come together in the church felt very different. Suddenly those conversations were on the walls, with families and friends standing in front of them.

Victoria had reworked the Bolivian pollera, the traditional dress of the cholitas of South America, into a figure of the Ekeko, the symbol of hope and abundance from the Bolivian story she grew up with. Her short film alongside the textile gathered conversations with Latin Americans about culture, memory and what they would want passed on. She said she wanted it to feel like a love letter to South America. It did.

Robin’s writing took up a quieter corner. Ordinary and Unique is a verbatim project gathering the stories of transgender people and their allies across the UK on what it means to come out. It refuses the drama the topic is often expected to carry, and makes the case, patiently, that these stories are varied, unique and fundamentally ordinary.

Ore’s portraits brought together Nigerian heritage and the Ankara patterns of Nigerian culture, painted in oil and overlaid with hand-cut stencil patterns sprayed onto the canvas. Heritage, legacy and contribution, she calls them. The three concepts that guide her work. All three were in the room.

Then Lily, Stéfan and Sydney spoke.

Lily started painting after her autism diagnosis. She takes the landscape of her studio as her subject, with the mirror as her motif and a nod to Norman Rockwell, leaving a blank canvas at the heart of the image. A quiet, political work, made so that the people who most need to find themselves in it can.

Stéfan spoke about To Be King, his project placing Black subjects at the centre of British stories that have claimed and questioned them in the same breath.

Sydney described her audiovisual piece deconstructing the American Dream, structured across three song movements as what she calls a “moving editorial” blending high fashion, camp and psychological horror. She spoke about what it has meant to live and be perceived as a Black American in the UK, and about colonisation, capitalism and the prison-industrial complex sitting underneath the surface of the work.

Abi spoke for the Youth Advisory Board, the young people who have helped shape this programme from the inside, and reminded us why young people are not waiting to be invited into rooms like this one.

One of the loveliest parts of the evening was watching the families and friends of the artists see the work in the space. There was so much pride in the room. People stood close to the pieces, took photographs, asked questions and listened. You could feel what it meant for the artists to have their work taken seriously.

Alongside the UK artists, we had also invited a small number of young leaders from further afield to share their work in the room. This is, first and foremost, a UK programme, built for young adults living and working here. But the questions the cohort will sit with over the next eighteen months do not stop at the edges of this country, and neither does leadership.

A young writer in Gaza captured ordinary routines: preparing for work, teaching, volunteering at an orphanage, continuing university studies, practising writing, alongside the memory of an older brother whose absence had become a quiet commitment to keep going for the children he had loved.

Fariha, from Afghanistan, could not show her face for safety reasons, so her work shared instead the smiles of the fifty or sixty girls she teaches through circus skills training, after her own education was interrupted when universities and educational institutions closed for girls and women.

A young woman in Idaho contributed work made through cancer treatment.

Their pieces travelled when they could not. It mattered that they were on the walls beside the UK work, and not separated from it.

None of it was loud. All of it had been carried, worked through and sat with for a long time before it got to us.

This is what we mean when we say the Cugoano Changemaker Programme is built around its participants. It selects young adults whose leadership is already happening, often without anyone calling it that, and gives them eighteen months of serious support to do more of it: paid Circle days, mentoring, funded projects of up to six thousand pounds each, accommodation when overnight travel is needed, and a peer cohort across the UK they can rely on.

The programme treats participants as people doing real work.

Lens is part of how the programme keeps itself honest. The cohort’s perspective stays at the centre of what gets seen, talked about and shown. Some Lens work stays inside the group as a way of paying close attention. Some travels, like the work on Tuesday’s walls, into public conversation, always with the artist’s consent.

There were also many more young artists who submitted thoughtful and powerful applications than we were able to include this time. That stayed with us. It reminded us that Lens cannot just be one evening. There is more work to do, and more young people whose creativity, judgement and stories deserve space.

Applications are now open for the first cohort of fifteen Cugoano Changemakers. Over the next eighteen months, fifteen young adults from across the UK will work together, develop their own funded projects, and learn to act on what they see.

Fifteen is a deliberately small number. The depth of the work depends on it. But the Lens, and what comes after it, is not closed to the fifteen alone. Tuesday was proof of that.

The work that came down off the walls of St James’s that Tuesday is only the start.

If something in that room is calling you, come and find us at sjp.org.uk/cugoano-changemakers.