Awards and Accolades for GROUNDation Poetry Project

November 24th, 2015 by Keisha Bhamra.

In September 2015, The GROUNDation Poetry Project II won a Gold Award under the ‘Arts Projects’ category as part of this year’s Koestler Awards for art made in detention.

The Koestler received over 8,500 pieces of writing, music, film, fine art and design for the 2015 awards which were judged by industry professionals such as, Carol Ann Duffy and Jeremy Deller.

Safe Ground submitted the anthology ‘Home’ as well as photographs and links to the videos created during the project. This was made possible by the contribution made by the men in HMP Wandsworth and people from the local Wandsworth community who ultimately created the poetry, which is now prized more publically.

And the accolades keep heading our way. Following our entry to the 2015 Idox Innovation Awards, the project was selected as the ‘Highly Commended project of Category 2: Innovation in Promoting Community Engagement.

Panel members included Dawn Austwick OBE, Chief Executive of Big Lottery Fund, Andrew Chamberlain, Chief Executive of ARMA, Clare Goff, Editor of New Start magazine and Paul Welshman, Associate Director of Enterprise University of Salford. They judged projects on meeting criteria such as, creative approaches to addressing a defined issue and positive and practical benefits for the wider community.

We are featured with some prominence in their ebrochure (which you can download here) and you can go to the awards page of Idox here to read some more about the prize and why we were commended.