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Tips & Tricks Cards

A series of thought-provoking recommendations for collaboration, innovation and action.

Use them as tips and discussion-starters to reflect on your work and explore new possibilities. A range of card packs are available for artists, community members, researchers and others interested in meaningful collaboration.

We’ve been co-designing Tips & Tricks resources since 2014, when we worked with academics and community activists to explore how they could better understand each other’s ways of working.

Each Tips & Tricks resource pack includes 20 cards: each card displays a short statement and a colourful illustration, with advice ranging from being ‘dogged but not inflexible’ to remembering that experts should be ‘on tap, not on top’.

Get Your Own Pack

We are currently looking into ways to produce and sell Tips & Tricks resources. Please email us to be added to the waiting list – enquiries@kwmc.org.uk. Alternatively, you are welcome to download them for free below and print them yourself. These resources are open-source as part of the Commons: a movement dedicated to shared ownership and collective care.

If you’d like to support our work, we are always welcoming donations of any size.

Current KWMC ‘Tips & Tricks’ resources include:

How to Use

1. Interpretation: this activity is a useful discussion-starter to gauge differences of opinion and interpretation within your team.  

Read each card in turn and note down how relevant you feel it is to your work or organisation.  You could use the following questions as prompts to help you: 

2. Reflection: This activity identifies the strengths of your current practice and ways you could improve.  

Individually or in small teams, choose up to three cards that represent your practice at its best. You could select cards to reflect issues you’re particularly sensitive to, progress you’ve made, or something else entirely.  

Then choose up to three cards to represent the areas of your work you’d most like to improve. Discuss your thinking and come up with at least one action you can take to bring each ‘improvement’ closer to reality. 

3. Inspiration: This activity sparks your own tips.

Based on your own practice and experience, what’s the most important piece of advice you’d give to someone working in a similar setting? Discuss and agree your recommendations, then use blank cards to create your own Tips & Tricks! 

Training

We regularly use Tips & Tricks resources in workshops to support organisations, Living Labs, businesses and international delegations to explore how they can develop positive relationships with communities, create an environment of trust and openness, and demonstrate the impact of their work.  This can include developing Tips and Tricks of their own to guide their work and ensure that stakeholders are involved at all levels.

Please contact us if you would like us to work with your team: enquiries@kwmc.org.uk.

The Origins of Tips & Tricks

In April 2014 Dr Sharon Irish hosted a Praxis Cafe at KWMC exploring activism in the area. Knowle West has a history of grassroots action, particularly among women.  Many have set up charities, started community initiatives and continue to strive to improve their area for everyone.  ‘Fixin’ it ourselves: women activists in Knowle West’ included discussion, personal testimony and making, and encouraged the women who attended to share their experiences, challenges and successes.

Building on the 20 years of experience and expertise of KWMC and following the event, we developed the ideas into two sets of 20 recommendations, inspired by the work and advice of the women activists: ‘Tips and Tricks for community activists’ and ‘Tips and Tricks for academics working with community activists’.

We went on to use the Tips & Tricks format in work with the European Network of Living Labs (ENoLL) in 2015 when we held a workshop at the 2015 ENoLL summer conference. The advice, wisdom and experiences shared during the workshop, and the subsequent contributions of Living Labs across the world, were transformed into 20 Tips & Tricks for Living Labs.

In 2018 we worked with Knowle West residents and artists to develop Tips & Tricks for Artists and Communities Working Together through our exhibition and artist residency programme Living, Working, Making Together.

With thanks to academics Dr Angela Piccini, Dr Morag McDermot and Sue Cohen for their contributions to this work.