Deveron Projects, Huntly
Deveron Projects is an art organisation rooted in Huntly, Aberdeenshire for over 30 years. They don’t have a gallery or art centre, instead Deveron Projects makes art collaboratively with artists and communities in public, across the town. This includes organising regular events, producing collaborative projects and developing creative community infrastructure. Taken together, this work catalyses citizenship and supports communities to organise together around the issues that impact them most.
In 2018, in response to Huntly’s collaborative town strategy Room To Thrive, Deveron Projects purchased an empty shop on Huntly Town Square with support from Scottish Land Fund. The organisation’s decades of projects exploring public space, food cultures and food security, identity and belonging, climate breakdown and community organising, laid the foundations for a development that involved communities at every step, inviting them to imagine together how the building should be used with architects Drassana and Jill Andrews in the project What Can We Make This Place?
Today, Square Deal is a thriving community hub, home to over 50 groups and organisations, from youth groups to yoga, book clubs to music and much more. Deveron Projects coordinates the hub, supporting people make their ideas happen. As just one of three buildings taken into community ownership on The Square (see also No. 30 and Orbs Bookshop), Square Deal is focused on being a safer space for communities who experience barriers to other public spaces in the town. This shows how collaboration with other organisations is key to Deveron Projects work – even in a small town, anchor organisations can work together to complement and enhance each other’s initiatives, better representing the diversity of communities who live there.
For Deveron Projects, relationships are everything and are what makes real change possible. Getting to know people well and building trust, allows for deeper and meaningful collaboration over many years. Communities from Square Deal, and from the organisation’s regular community lunches, community cookery workshops and community garden sessions learn new skills and build connections with each other. This makes for a joined up and collaborative ethos, where ambitious ideas can be realised and communities are empowered to realise change on their terms.
A significant example of this is the project the Town is the Garden, funded by the Climate Challenge Fund. Despite taking place a number of years ago, Huntly is still feeling the ripple effects today. The project brought people together to craft gardens, vegetable plots and orchards, and attempt to rethink how a community might feed itself as it faces up to the global climate and ecological emergency. It established the Brander Community Garden, which has continued to be developed and activated through projects Flax Turns and Caretakers Garden. Other initiatives developed through the project are now stewarded beyond Deveron Projects – the seed library and orchard are developed and cared for by an independent group called Greener Huntly, who were set up in response to The Town is the Garden and Room To Thrive strategy. They are working to establish a decentralised market garden across the town, among other ambitious plans.
