12 Days of Impact: 2025 in reflection

In the closing days of 2025, we posted on social media about the impact Makespace Oxfordshire had over the prior 12 months. Here’s a round-up of these posts.

1. 250+ organisations supported into space 🤝

First up, we hit a big milestone this year. We reached 250 organisations that we’ve supported into space. In fact, at the time of writing, we’ve reached 276!

That’s 276 locally-rooted and purpose-driven organisations with access to affordable space to help further their work. We have residents doing incredible front line work, like Mental Health Natters who offer accessible mental health support to local people, including young people and carers who might otherwise struggle to access these services. Or Transition Lighthouse working with people from African diaspora communities who have lived experience of trauma and Iraqi Women Art and War, an organisation of women affected by conflict who share their experiences and stories through art.

Here’s to even more organisations able to secure the space they need, grow and build capacity in 2026!

2. We (re)founded with a renewed focus on spatial justice 🌱

We unveiled Makespace Oxfordshire’s vision for change in April 2025. We started our journey unlocking one empty space – Aristotle Lane in Jericho – to help organisations for social good access affordable space. But, we refined and updated our missions to reflect our new North Star: spatial justice.

If our systems of property and place are rife with inequity, then physical space is an issue of justice — and any fight for justice has a spatial dimension.

We want to be part of a movement that transforms Oxfordshire into a healthy, thriving, just space for all, for generations to come. And, at Makespace, that starts with equitable access to space.

To learn more, read our (Re)founding Makespace Oxford(shire) blog post.

3. Shaping place & fostering connection through South Abingdon art pop-ups 🎨

In 2025, we hosted three art pop-ups in South Abingdon. Over 250 people from the local community attended, to get creative and connect. We were able to focus on ecological activities and place shaping in an area with limited social infrastructure.

Through feedback gathered, we found:

🤝Families made new friends and felt more connected
🌿Parents found a calm space to chat and breathe
🎨Children gained confidence through creative play
🖌️Local artists shared their skills and felt valued
🌳Participants felt a greater connection with nature
✨People found it inclusive for neurodivergent children
👨‍👨‍👦‍👦Attendees valued the intergenerational nature of the event

4. Building community capacity through the OSEP business support programme 💡

During 2025, we took part in OSEP’s business support programme offering free, tailored support to develop social enterprises in Oxford City and the South and Vale areas of Oxfordshire. This allowed us to help more organisations build their capacity so they can resist, develop, grow, and thrive.

We ran a series of workshops, peer group sessions and 1:1 support sessions, all aimed to help businesses for social good develop and gain access to space. We understand that accessing space can be a huge barrier for small social businesses and we aim to give people the tools to grow their projects and see them flourish.

5. Community building through International Women’s Day events♀️⚧️

Throughout March 2025, Makespace Oxfordshire marked International Women’s Day with a month-long series, in collaboration with members of our resident community. From poetry and storytelling to shared meals, talks, and creative workshops, the programme showed what becomes possible when women face fewer barriers to space and expression.

Evoke Belonging’s special IWD poetry night kicked things off at the start of the month, followed by grown-up storytelling at The Community Works, a delicious pop-up dinner from Iraqi Women Art and War, and Uncomfortable Oxford’s powerful exploration of hidden women’s histories. Oxford Poetry Library events centred women’s voices across the month, and Beautiful Minds Drama Club staged their first public performance: Suffragettes. We also loved seeing residents try something new — like Taiwo Oluwatuyi piloting her first Oxford sewing workshop.

Shared meals, discussion circles, and collaborative workshops created environments where women connected across backgrounds and experiences, building community and capacity.

6. We unlocked more space to support social impact 🔓

We opened a new central Oxford hub in 2025. 9 Park End Street is a former office building that had been sitting largely empty for several years. This unlocked almost 2,800 square metres of space, supporting 9 organisations and upwards of 20 jobs.

It also allowed us to create a shared space that we intend to use for experiments into commoning. Watch this space for more information in the new year.

 7. Supporting organisations to take on space ✨

We’ve been proud to support YWMP in taking a big step forward in 2025 — helping them acquire their own meanwhile lease directly with the landlord and consulting on the practicalities of setting up a building.

The project provides an inclusive, supportive space for young women and trans and non-binary people to get together to make music, learn new skills, express themselves, and grow in confidence. Having their own space lets them support more young people in the area and develop their safer spaces policy in practice, helping make gigs safer and more accessible for everyone.

It’s exactly the kind of work we love: empowering grassroots organisations to take control of the spaces they need to thrive.

Of course, we helped with just one part of the journey. Since then, the incredible YWMP team has put in countless hours making the place look amazing, kitting it out for live music, running sessions for young people, and providing the volunteers and resources to run safer events at The Nest, to name just a portion of the work they do.

8. Successful completion of the National Lottery grant programme supported growth & built capacity🎉

Over the past three years the National Lottery Community Fund helped us do more than unlock buildings. We were able to offer practical 1:1 support from our Community Coordinators and rent support to get organisations off the ground, make our buildings more accessible and welcoming, and strengthen ties between our residents and the wider community.

Voices from the hubs:

“The Junction is perfect for our needs and people always comment on how calming the space is. It has been fantastic to see some people with more complex needs coming to these sessions, who often get overwhelmed in group situations, and joining in and feeling relaxed.” – Style Acre

“Makespace has given me the wonderful opportunity to start my first business venture, which would not have been possible without the support I’ve received.” – Naomi Merritt, Therapist

“Our community work wouldn’t have been possible without the space that Makespace has provided.” — Kate Farrington, Down to Earth Cafe

We’re always open to talking to anyone interested in funding the work Makespace Oxfordshire does, from unlocking spaces and shaping places with local communities, to the slower, more complex work of system change.

9. Shared our learnings to support local property partnerships in other parts of the country 🤝

Platform Places is a cross-sector partnership committed to unlocking town centre spaces for amazing ideas. Last year they secured £2.5m from the National Lottery to develop their model through five local property partnerships.

We’ve been delighted to mentor and support Bedminster Works, one of the pilot projects based in Bristol. We’ve been sharing our learning, supporting the development of their strategy, and refining a model along the lines of Makespace’s but tailored to their place.

Bedminster Works are now developing their team and governance, building local community connections and pursuing their first spaces to unlock and revitalise.

We’re looking forward to working closely with them across 2026, offering tailored support, mentoring and strategic guidance to help them bring community ownership to Bedminster.

10. Civic imagination & place-shaping through our Common Futures programme 🏛️

Last year, our Common Futures event programme brought people together across public workshops and events to imagine and shape the kind of civic life we want in Oxford — especially ahead of our new George Street space (scheduled opening 2028). These gatherings surfaced local stories, gathered lived experience, and helped build the relationships and ideas needed to make spatial justice a reality. We collaborated with local groups and individuals to platform the great work they’re doing.

Here’s a taste of what we ran:

✂️ Zine workshop with Oxford Poetry Library: Mapping personal memories of Oxford through poetry, collage and shared art – storytelling that re-centres lived experience in how a place is remembered and represented.

🔎 Street detectorism with CoLab Dudley: Playful public-space mapping at Gloucester Green Market – collecting grassroots data that reveals who public spaces serve and who they exclude.

🌊 Tales of the Thames with Thames21 and Anya Gleizer: Creative, ecological responses and citizen-science taster sessions, connecting river health to community care and environmental justice.

📣 Sounds of the commons with Oxford Spatial Action Lab: An audio-guided walk through Oxford’s histories of enclosure and resistance, followed by collective manifesto-making and speculative design.

🌱 Evening with community innovators with Makena Lohr and Annie Davy of Flo’s: A supper and workshop on building community hubs, providing practical learning for people-led place-making.

🕰️ Time Rebellion with Roman Krznaric: A conversation about long-term thinking and being a good ancestor for future generations.

Each event acted as a small experiment in place-making: collecting local knowledge, strengthening networks, and centring voices too often left out of planning conversations. Thanks to everyone who joined, shared, and helped us think differently about space.

11. We celebrated our community connections and debuted our vision for change Marmalade Festival🍊

As part of our (re)founding last year we celebrated being part of the Mycelial Network; a web of Community Asset Developers all working towards neighbourhood transformation, sharing resources, ideas and vision for place-rooted change.

At Marmalade Festival, we brought together the incredible Juliet Can of Stour Trust, Victoria Barrow Williams of People Dem Collective, Jess Steele of Hastings Commons, and Rebecca Trevalyan of Platform Places as chair to explore themes of commoning and how we can work towards spatial justice, alongside our own Andy Edwards.

To influence change and transform the land and property system we need to tell a different story. We discussed our reorientation toward spatial justice and the fact the answers to all the problems we face already exist everywhere, they simply need the right conditions to spread, grow and thrive. And we heard from our group of panelists about the work they’re doing in their own communities.

We were joined by a packed room of local citizens, activists, collaborators, and funders, who co-created a vision for Oxfordshire in 2035, imagining it as an ecologically safe and socially just space for all.

Thanks to our panellists for their energy and for inspiring us! Watch the full recording here.

12. Community events and activities had impact across our four missions 🏘️

In 2025, we delivered 35 Makespace-led events, co-hosted 61 partner activities, and enabled 181 community-led sessions through free or subsidised hires across our nine hubs — reaching 7,500+ community members. But, it’s about more than figures. Our events show how our four missions work in practice.

🔓 UNLOCK: By opening and activating underused buildings we created places where activity can happen. The combined programme of events and hires kept spaces in productive use and put local people at the heart of place-making.

🔧 BUILD CAPACITY: Resident-led and partner activities helped build community capacity. The free and subsidised hires were a low-barrier route for emerging groups to build confidence and income.

📣 INFLUENCE: The 61 partner activities show how we amplify impact through collaboration, building relationships that extend the benefit beyond our walls. Some events also act as a conversation starter, beginning to form a stronger narrative with which to challenge the conditions that cause vacancy and displacement.

🌱 TRANSFORM: These activities are prototyping a different approach. One where communities can shape a more equitable future together. The reach and learning from these programmes are feeding into our strategic shift towards spatial justice.