In 2015 I set up Hands On Art Workshops to offer visual art activities to young people growing up in Kakuma Refugee Camp, Kenya. Hands On Art Workshops is supported by Vodafone Foundation and UNHCR, the UN Refugee Agency.

Kakuma is home to over 190,000 refugees of 21 nationalities. Many of the 92,000 children living in the camp were born into it, and have never left. Art is not widely offered in the national curriculum in Kenya, which is delivered to schools in Kakuma, so these workshops offer opportunities for students to develop their creative skills often for the first time at school.

I’ve set up this JustGiving page so that more students growing up in Kakuma can take part in and benefit from the Hands On Art Workshops. Your donations will enable the delivery of the workshops for the next five years, by:

 Providing art educational materials for students

 Enabling artists and facilitators to travel to the camp and deliver practical workshops in person

 Funding five ‘Hands On Art Workshops Scholarships’ – offers an annual scholarship to cover full secondary school tuition for a Hands On student (supported and administered by Windle International Kenya)

Photos: ‘Group Portrait’ (top) and ‘Rings’ (above) Hands On Art Workshops. Created by students from Angelina Jolie Primary School, Morneau Shepell Secondary School and Our Lady’s Girls Secondary School at Kakuma Refugee Camp, Kenya, April 2019

About Hands On Art Workshops:

My programme offers practical art workshops to primary and secondary school students in Kakuma Refugee Camp, Kenya. Hands On Art Workshops are facilitated by Vodafone Foundation and UNHCR’s ‘Instant Network Schools’ programme, which exists to connect refugee students to a quality digital education. Hands On Art Workshops utilises digital video conference technology, allowing me to deliver live workshops through “the screen” in London to students 6,000 miles away in the camp. I travel to Kakuma annually to deliver workshops in person, working with the UNHCR Education team.

Colart supports the delivery of Hands On Art Workshops with generous donations of art materials.

The aim of Hands On Art Workshops is to support and encourage creative and imaginative thinking, engagement and exchange globally and intergenerationally between artists and students. The workshops are grounded in my own practice, and actually grew out of my drawing workshop, “Everyday Objects”, that I developed for art students based on my approach to still life painting.

All Hands On Art Workshops are devised by artists, and based on the artist’s practice. Hands On students can develop their creative skills through drawing, painting, performance, object-making, writing, and aspects of design.

Hands On Art Workshops areis supported by Vodafone Foundation (UK registered charity 1089625), UNHCR, Colart, Slade School of Fine Art, UCL and Windle International Kenya.

Thank you.