About Us
01 Inclusive by Design
Our mission is to create more opportunity for young people to be able to participate in our built environment. We constantly try our best to keep our prices affordable and offer free, community spaces in all our classes.
02 Agency for Change
By providing architecture education to children, our future adult citizens will have different expectations of quality regarding their built environments. They would be less likely to perceive architecture as primarily a matter of ‘decoration’, and more likely to take an active role in its development - whether that is as designers or as the conscious recipients and advocates of their own built environment.
03 Collaboration over Competition
By hosting our outreach sessions at the University of the West of England, we provide collaborative opportunities for our UWE volunteers to share their experiences, knowledge and perspectives with our OCC students - and vice versa! This supportive environment helps to build confidence, generate ideas and realise the potential of collaboration over competition.
Our Team
Alongside our team, we will have volunteer UWE students dropping in at our sessions, as well as other tutors. All those assisting with our sessions are DBS checked and our students are accompanied by us from drop off to pick up.
This collaboration is a great chance for our students to have a glimpse of university life as well as to engage in skill sharing and confidence building. Our volunteers get the opportunity to practise their organisation, communication and leadership skills and witness the positives of outreach which we hope they will take with them into their professional lives.
Kate Byrne is a passionate and experienced teacher and the founder of Our Creative Community. Her expertise lies within the field of architecture; she has an honours degree in Architecture from Newcastle University and worked in practice before focusing on education. She has been teaching for over a decade and, in September 2023, took up position as a tutor at the University of West England Bristol's International College teaching the International Foundation to students progressing on to study Architecture.
Kate set up OCC in 2020 and, since then, has witnessed the inherent value in architectural education for young people. By providing architecture education to children, our future adult citizens will have different expectations of quality regarding their built environments - they would be less likely to perceive architecture as primarily a matter of ‘decoration’, and more likely to take an active role in its development.
Elena Hayward is an multimedia Artist based in Bristol. Her work is often playful and energetic with a focus on character, colour and humour. She is influenced by film, television, science fiction and history - the odder the better! The combination of the surreal and the mundane is a reoccurring theme in her work and often features Monsters, Myths and Aliens.
She also teaches alongside her practice, and is passionate about community and storytelling, and shares this sentiment in workshops for OCC and for other institutions around Bristol. She recently completed a set of workshops for the RWA entitled Making the City Home which showcases the visual stories of women who have made Bristol their home. Elena worked with several Women's groups including Refugee Women of Bristol and Dhek Bhal Women's Group to create beautiful textiles to describe how they experience the city.
