SEEKING THE PIONEERS: A HERITAGE LOTTERY FUND PROJECT
We are now starting the second year of our two-year Heritage Lottery Fund project called Seeking the Pioneers and I wanted to provide an update of how the first year has gone. In a quick summary, the Seeking the Pioneers project celebrates the powerful history of local anti-racist activism from the 1940s to today. We aimed to connect and inspire communities by preserving the stories of trailblazing pioneers who challenged structural racism and shaped modern Birmingham, Britain and continue to do so.
Birmingham has a rich heritage of anti-racist activism and movement-building. Through Seeking the Pioneers, BRIG has been teaching a new generation of creatives, activists, and historians how to collect and present oral histories from these transformative leaders. By documenting this legacy while it remains within living memory, the project ensures that the lessons of the past can empower future generations.
So where are we 12 months after we started the project. We set up a steering committee of various key individuals within the city of Birmingham who have helped to guide us through our project by helping to develop a list of Pioneers, of which we have over 100 names at the moment. From this list and through the contacts and knowledge of our pioneers, we have continued to develop this list.
I am proud to report that in year 1, we have managed to successfully interview over 40 ‘pioneers’, capturing their stories and presented this through our Seeking the Pioneers exhibition in our new BRIG café in October 2024. We then developed a booklet which we have been giving out to people and which is available on our website. This gives you an idea of what we are trying to achieve in the overall project. It is imperative that we reclaim the narratives which may get lost as pioneers have gotten older, moved on from Birmingham or have passed. Many of our pioneers in our great city including the likes of Stuart hall, Benjamin Zephaniah are no longer with us, so we wanted to make sure that this project covers as much as we can whilst continuing to grow day by day.
Alongside capturing the stories of the Pioneers, we developed a programme which we have been training our ‘Race History Detectives’, a group of people all interested in learning about the history of Birmingham, the roots of Racism, oral history and around activism. This has been hugely successful and attracted a wide range of individuals from college students, university students through to elders in our community keen to learn the material but also keen to go and interview Pioneers themselves. We are training people on all the skills around interviewing, research, editing and how to use equipment and how to do podcasts.
A key part of the Seeking the Pioneers project was the commission of a literature review. We are just in the final stages of this review and we will share more details once we have all our papers peer-reviewed by key individuals from education and also activism, often a combination of both. Alongside this literature review, we will have an interactive timeline which will go onto our new website which we hope to be up and ready by October 2025.
I am proud to be the Heritage Development Officer on such a key project which has been really well received by our Pioneers, our Detectives, friends and supporters of BRIG and there is not a day that goes by where someone does not ask to know more about the pictures on our Café walls. Since its launch in October 2024 we have had 5000+ people who have seen the exhibition, which has sparked real conversations and interest in our work. An example of this was when we held a Vivid Arts event in our café for Digbeth First Fridays, in respect to our pioneer Muhammad Idrish.
Ibrar
Heritage Development Officer
