About
Community
Centred
Knowledge (CCK)

Community Centred Knowledge (CCK) operates as a collective of intergenerational artists, researchers, students and community workers. We centre the experiences, histories and aspirations of all global majority communities, especially those that have been and continue to be dispossessed and especially those of African and Caribbean heritage.

We affirm Ubuntu as a core philosophy for our collective progress. Ubuntu is an African-inspired concept of interdependence across all aspects of life. We encourage and welcome the solidarity of allies who choose to affirm our core philosophy in word and action.

Celebrating community, we share knowledge of all kinds and paths that attune with our core philosophy. This knowledge is informed and assessed by community experience and we especially value indigenous cosmologies which are inter-connected between spirit and earth.

Our aim is to build ‘The People’s’ Knowledge for The People’s’ Progress’. We affirm the following life lesson: ‘there is no way out but through.’ As a result, we support developing personal and community skills and capacities to help us face life challenges.

We do this through engaging:

The Multisensory

We work with as many of the senses as we can to better demonstrate the many dimensions in which we both live and communicate and give and receive nourishment.

The Imaginary

We draw upon creative and exploratory modes that bring us better in touch with each other and with other forms of life.

The Interactive

We feel that we learn life better when we are being relational and that means establishing and exploring relationships across time and space.

Storytelling

We feel that each and everyone of us holds a narrative about our lives that is worth sharing and/or documenting. All of us engage with stories, whether fact or fiction, a story holds a thousand pictures!

We draw on the pluriverse of knowledge and being. We call upon somatic, artistic, embodied, relational and spiritual ways of knowing as intrinsic to knowledge. We apply these ways to food justice and food autonomies – cultivating earth as we cultivate good relations. There is also environmental justice and community planning; honouring life cycles and other circulations of matter, knowledge and energy (reusing, recycling and upcycling).

We recognise that we are also more than human beings, and so we work in relationship with multiple, intersecting ecologies in solidarity and towards reciprocity. We wish to encourage the sharing of knowledge and wisdom that resides within all kinds of communities, and we want to support putting that knowledge to good for and by the communities that produce it!

Engage with us

Many people have engaged with CCK over the last seven years, some of these simply move through, taking what they need and move on. We want to offer a more sound and equitable spirit of invitation, promoting a greater integrity for all involved, whilst also developing a more reciprocal collective structure and process. Our work with communities will be a collective working out and inhabiting the most appropriate governance and people-centred structure that can support this.

Look at our past, present and future activities page to get an idea of what we’ve been up to: here in the UK and further afield.

We are growing, evolving, and creating new pathways for knowledge, healing and justice. We are an organisation that centres care and creativity. If this sounds like your kind of work, we’d love to hear from you!