Communities have a right to joy.

We believe recreation, celebration and collective joy should not be privileges.

For many families, everyday life is shaped by work and multiple responsibilities of care, within the home, but also across extended families, neighbourhoods and communities. Having time and space to rest, dance, play, celebrate and simply enjoy being together matters.

Fiesta is therefore more than an event or a few hours of entertainment. It can be a way of creating connections, strengthening relationships and transforming an ordinary moment into a collective experience.

Throughout Solidarity Summer, fiestas and creative activities will create spaces where different generations and communities can come together. Celebration becomes a form of community-building: a way of meeting one another, creating memories and strengthening the relationships from which longer-term collective action can grow.

Against food deprivation. For community nourishment.

Food is a basic need, and the challenges of food insecurity become particularly visible during the school holidays, when many families lose access to free school meals while already facing increasing living costs.

Our programme responds directly to this reality through free community meals. But we also understand food as something that goes far beyond physical nourishment.

Across cultures and communities, preparing, sharing and eating food together has always created spaces of encounter. Around a table, a kitchen or a shared pot, people exchange stories, knowledge, memories and experiences. Relationships are built, informal support networks emerge, and conversations that might not happen in formal settings become possible.

Community kitchens and collective meals have also played an important role in movements for housing, workers' rights, migrant justice and neighbourhood organising across the world. Feeding one another can become an act of solidarity and collective care.

At the same time, we recognise that the work of feeding and caring for communities is not distributed equally. These responsibilities have historically fallen disproportionately on women, whose often invisible labour sustains families, neighbourhoods and networks of solidarity.

The community creates. The community cares. The community teaches.

Tottenham holds an extraordinary amount of knowledge. Decades of local campaigns and collective struggles have generated practical knowledge about how communities can organise, protect spaces, develop community plans, raise funds, mobilise volunteers, create organisations, negotiate with institutions and imagine alternative ways of owning and managing neighbourhood assets.

Much of this knowledge does not live in textbooks or institutions. It lives within people: residents, traders, campaigners, parents, community leaders, local organisations and the networks that have sustained these struggles over many years.

Solidarity Summer starts from the idea that everyone has something to learn and everyone has something to teach. Through workshops, drop-ins, informal conversations, practical activities and technical support, we want to create spaces where this knowledge can circulate between communities.

This includes learning about retrofit, democratic and community ownership, fundraising, governance, taking on leases and building sustainable organisations, but also learning how to care collectively, create networks of support and organise around shared challenges.

Community pedagogy means recognising communities not simply as recipients of information or services, but as producers of knowledge in their own right.