RE[engage]: From the City to the Hills

For companies, councils and local development agencies navigating social value commitments, this session is a close look at what deep and meaningful community engagement actually looks like when it’s led through creative and cultural process, not the version that ticks a compliance box, but the version that builds real trust, shares power with communities, and leaves something that lasts.

Brink! present three collaborative projects that trace this practice from a single derelict site in Belfast’s city centre, to a network of gardens across four neighbourhoods, to Ligoniel Dams, up in the Belfast hills, each one a live case study in what culture, storytelling and heritage skills can achieve that conventional engagement frameworks often can’t. All three have been developed in ongoing partnership with Grow and quarto.

‘A Growing Story’ shows how using the heritage of growing, cooking and eating as an entry point opened up conversations about food system instability and the climate crisis with people not usually at the heart of heritage or engagement projects, turning a derelict meanwhile-site into a garden, gathering place and events space.

‘Heritage Stories’ shows how that process scales: a meanwhile exhibition and a series of workshops co-designed with community-led gardens across North, South, East and West Belfast, each shaped around what that neighbourhood’s own community wanted to explore about its natural and cultural heritage.

‘The Story of Flax’ shows what this looks like from first contact onward. Still very much in progress, it’s built relationships with communities in north Belfast before asking anything of them, using flax, a plant once central to the city’s economy and identity, as a way into difficult conversations about industrial history, labour and environmental harm, grounded throughout in hands-on growing and making.

Together, these three collaborative projects offer companies and local development agencies a working model: what genuine capacity building, meaningful participation and cultural place-making look like in practice, and what it takes to get there.

Why now?

Climate change is no longer a future risk to plan for; it’s a present reality communities are already adapting to. At the same time, social value can’t be an afterthought bolted onto delivery , for companies bidding on contracts, councils setting strategy, and local development agencies delivering on the ground, it has to be built in from the start, backed by real investment in the knowledge and skills needed to deliver it well.

That’s a shift from engagement as a checkbox exercise to something deeper: capacity building, meaningful participation, bringing communities together, and increasingly, cultural place-making. Done well, this is what distinguishes organisations that create genuine community benefit and support community wealth building from those that don’t.

Cultural and heritage organisations bring specific capabilities that technical and infrastructure-led approaches often lack: the ability to recognise and value local knowledge, respect lived experience, and create platforms for communities to tell their own stories and contribute to decisions about their own landscapes. Getting this right takes real trust in relationships and process, and that’s exactly what this session sets out to show, drawing on projects at every stage, from several years deep to just beginning. For anyone responsible for meeting social value policy, community wealth building commitments, climate adaptation strategy, or delivering meaningful legacy from a major infrastructure project, this is a chance to see, close up, what that work actually requires.