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Words by Eva Didier
Photographs by Ivan D’Avoine and Stephen Lee
On an exceedingly hot May morning, the Power of Pop Fund community gathered at Toynbee Hall for our 2026 Collective Learning Event. Collective Learning is an opportunity to bring together incredible organisations using culture, arts and entertainment to make the world a little bit better. The event gives partners the opportunity to reflect on the year past, overcome challenges together and strategise for what is to come. For our 7th event, this was also an opportunity for partners from Cohort 1, Cohort 2, and Cohort 3 to welcome new partners from Cohort 4 – MAMA Youth Project(opens in new window), Fully Focused(opens in new window)and Climate Reframe(opens in new window).
In the past few years, we have evolved the format of these events, putting our own stamp on the POP Fund learning programme. Seizing the opportunity of convening our community for a full day (including partner organisations, Community Council members and core team), we wanted to take a daring approach to reimagine what learning and collective strategising could look like. We centred partners’ interests in designing the day and we built on last year’s event to progress our collaboration from vision to action.
Our Collective Learning Events endeavour to balance both joy and deep work. Spirits were high, and rhetoric was set ablaze through a game of ‘hot takes: these ice breaker moments, allowed the group to bond more deeply, build trust and create a fertile ground for collective ideating.
Our collective strategising centred on one pressing question: how can we shape the UK we want as a collective?
Over the course of the day, several key takeaways emerged.
🌍 Search for Utopias
Our community reflected on the fact ‘we spend a lot of time talking about what’s wrong. Where is the utopia? You can’t achieve or create what you don’t see.’ If we want a more democratic, regulated and unified society, laying the foundations for the next generation is critically important. As a community, we are poised to do more than counter narratives that overemphasise scarcity, doom and competition as ineluctable (although that, too). We have the opportunity to prompt new ones. As funders, this also means challenging our bias. As one participant put it: ‘Funders want to fund problems. Young people, once freed, have ambitions to share positive messages.’
🗝️ Find the shared points of entry
We talked about the importance of shared points of entry: for instance, people across the UK are experiencing extreme heat. This is an opportunity to tell individual stories around migration and climate; to make audiences care and relate to these issues. We need stories where folks are better, more authentically, represented. We have the opportunity to reach audiences through different formats, such as gaming, to sustain and nourish our collective sense of possibility.
🪡 Build On Intergenerational heritage
To ensure sustainability in our movements, we need to look at structures of knowledge exchange and care. It deeply matters how we transmit, share, memorialise our work across generations. We must also look after ourselves, modelling and prioritising practices around mutual care to sustain ourselves and our work. Grantmakers have a significant role to play here, to support community leaders and prioritise sustainable care.
🕸️ Reclaim common ground
We reflected on the perils of algorithm manipulation, increased polarisation and division. There was a shared desire in the room to work together on identifying incentives for algorithms to perpetuate more honest, nuanced and balanced takes on society. Participants expressed an interest in advocating for research on algorithm manipulation and disinformation especially in relation to older generations’ use of social media, given their higher likelihood of voting.
✨ Pursue of Collective joy
A recurring theme was the importance of creating and maintaining spaces that nurture hope and joy – some examples were free festivals in the park, the Arsenal parade where multi-cultural Britain came out in droves. Time and again, partner organisations have shown that meaningful change is driven not only by the stories they tell, but by the ways they work, collaborate and engage audiences. Joy, especially when paired with community, can be used as a trojan horse to challenge power.
Partners Corner
One of the highlights of the Collective Learning Events is always Partners Corner. This year, we were treated to two brilliant presentations: firstly reflections on the legacy of the POP Fund support and its impact for The TV Collective(opens in new window); followed by a stimulating conversation around the political power of archiving from Skin Deep(opens in new window). In different ways, both cases echoed some of the themes discussed earlier in the day.
Care and joy were a central outcome of the POP Fund grant for the TV Collective founder Simone Pennant(opens in new window), who reflected on how “The POP Fund gave us time to think” and to slow down and strip back to rediscover their joy. In so doing, the organisation refined its vision, becoming more focused and impactful.
Intergenerational heritage, joy and utopias were all central to our discussion around archiving. Themes of access, continuity, and history were discussed, as Strategy Director Joëlle Parker-Hall made us ponder: what and how do you archive? What knowledge would be lost if your organisation disappeared tomorrow? What about archiving the joy within our communities, not just learning from the hardship but also from the joy, as both are key to help bring forth utopias.
POP Fund Cinema
Ultimately, the POP Fund is all about incredible creativity and so it only made sense to highlight some of the incredible work our funded partners OKRE have contributed to. The day ended with a POP Fund cinema, where we watched BAFTA-nominated film The Ceremony(opens in new window). Set in Bradford, the film explores themes of masculinity, migration and friendship. OKRE assisted the filmmakers’ creative process through facilitating collaborative work with those with lived experience of migration. Through consultation with local charities and migrant communities, this support significantly shaped the film’s development.
Closing Reflections
The Power of Pop Fund annual Collective Learning Event is an opportunity to collectively reflect, regroup and strategise. These events are intentionally designed to center joy, collaboration and community power, as we believe deeply in the value of nurturing the relationships within our ecosystem, and the long-term impact of bringing together incredible leaders in one room.
How do we preserve and carry forward what emerges from these collective moments? It is perhaps no surprise that the themes of memorialising and archives resonated so much throughout the day. The attraction of archives resides in their power as storytelling tokens to (re)tell our histories. In its own way, this blog is an offering to capture our exchanges, conversations and laughter – one collective learning day in the life of the POP Fund community. For indeed, as this reflection was shared at the end of the day:
‘We must believe the work we do is worthy of preservation’.
