http://www.changingrelations.co.uk/contact-us/

Changing Relations, Studio 18, Ushaw Historic House, Chapel and Gardens, Durham (2026)

Q: What is the address?

Studio 18, Ushaw Historic House, Chapel And Gardens

18/09/2026

Kate, our Artistic Director, was welcomed by the South West Durham Secondary Schools panel this week to share with them the opportunity for their schools to take part in the next phase of our domestic abuse themed A is for Amy programme which helps young people have healthier relationships, and, if they do find themselves in an unhealthy relationship, better able to ask for help.

We are super excited to shortly begin training teachers, pastoral staff and youth workers to deliver the A is for Amy programme in their settings.

There is no cost to schools or youth groups to take part in the programme: we’ll be providing full training and a toolkit containing everything needed to undertake delivery, thanks to the support of our amazing funders.

If you would like to explore your school delivering the A is for Amy programme this year please get in touch with Kate ([email protected]).

The A is for Amy programme is generously supported by funding from the Paul Hamlyn Foundation , Arts Council England , North East Mayoral Strategic Authority , NHS, The National Lottery Community Fund , BAM Construction Ltd, Barbour and Gaunless Gateway.

18/09/2026

This is us trying to make sure that the exhibition we develop for the College of St Hild and St Bede incorporates as much as the staff and students we spoke to said they wanted to see in line with the messaging they agreed we need to convey 🤩

14/09/2026

Part 2 of our new school year Intro to Changing Relations is focused on how we work.

As an organisation focused on gender stereotypes, domestic abuse & sexual attitudes, we're really conscious that these are tricky topics. Some will want to avoid them. Some will very strongly not want to be told what to think about them.

This is the absolute crux of why we use the arts. It is a way in. A means of creating an explorative space in which we can ask questions and reflect. A way to prompt empathy through the presentation of a character's experience, an experience whose personal impact we may not have previously considered.

And this makes the way we go about artistic creation really important. Our process of co-production together with those who have lived experience of the issues we address gives the resulting artworks a realness and resonance that our programme participants respond to.

Evaluation is the next piece of the puzzle. It's not enough to listen once. You need to listen throughout to find out what works, what's impactful, what's accessible, what's missing. All of our work is produced with an iterative process of listening, testing, learning, refining and testing some more because we want our educational offers to be the best they can be.

That brings us to quality. We have always believed that producing high quality art is integral to engaging participants in the tricky topics we address. And so we commission professional artists to shape the creative outputs that form the basis of our learning programmes.

The final piece of the puzzle is care. We recognise that, in asking our artists & facilitators to engage in tricky topics, & navigate the challenging lived experiences with our artwork, or shared by our participants in response, we need to create a space to consider their wellbeing.

To sum up How We Work in single word bullet points:

🥰 Art
🥰 Co-production
🥰 Lived Experience
🥰 Evaluation
🥰 Quality
🥰 Education
🥰 Care

If you feel like a nosy, 's fabby web design showcases:

💞 Our approach

💞 Our team

💞 The fabulous artists we've worked with over the years

Take a look 👀

https://changingrelations.co.uk/about/meet-the-team/

09/09/2026

Really delighted to be giving a new life to this artwork (that was originally produced by as part of our Let's Talk about S*x project) through a new commission for at .

After a buzzing staff and student engagement session in the Summer term, this week we begun working out the narrative arc of the exhibition we'll be installing as part of the HB 🩵 festival, based on the key messages and imagery the college want to showcase.

This image in Sofia's "brandalist" style fits with their idea of a positive, pro-social modelling of healthy and respectful relationships and will feature alongside works by and

Excited to see how it all comes together into a series of window panels to be installed later this term as part of a whole programme of art-tastic healthy relationship-themed activity.

Watch this space 👀

07/09/2026

The start of the new school year feels like a good time to re-introduce ourselves, especially as we have a spiffy new website designed by that sets out who we are and what we do super nicely.

So for the next couple of weeks, we're going to do an ~ Introducing Changing Relations ~ post each Monday, in case anyone has connected with us more recently and would find a little reminder useful 😊

To start us off, we're going to focus on the themes we work with. Over the years, the work we have produced has tended to fall into the following 3 themes:

🤩 Gender Stereotypes

🤩 Domestic Abuse and Healthy Relationships

🤩 S*xual Attitudes and Behaviours

In the How We Help section of our website, you will find a dedicated set of THEME pages, which outline the kinds of work we have developed in relation to each of these areas, with links to dedicated PROJECT pages taking you right back through our complete archive of activity and the resulting artworks and resources at each stage.

A 4th THEME emerged more recently as we reflected that the underlying thread of the way we do our work is a theme in itself of value to share with others:

🤩 Inclusive Practice

In the CASE STUDY section, the commissions and consultancy included has THEME filters so you can see the work we've done in relation to a given topic.

Take a look 👀

https://changingrelations.co.uk/how-we-help/domestic-abuse/

26/08/2026

We promised a new board reveal a few weeks back, and, now that the lovely has finished the illustrations of our new Non-Exec Directors for the governance page of our website, we're really delighted to share that and have been joined by three fabulous women:

🤩 Dale Glenister - an arts professional with experience across museums & galleries, finance and youth engagement. Dale works with creative businesses accessing investment via & also supports young people in museum based projects. She is passionate about widening access to the arts.

🤩 .Sarma - a mixed-methods researcher & photographer based at . Her work focuses on gender-based violence and intersectional inequalities across public health, sociology & criminal justice. She believes in the potential of creative methods to drive real-world impact.

🤩 Kimberly Cullen - whose background is in knowledge mobilisation, communications, project / programme management, violence prevention research, statistics and information, and events and stakeholder engagement. Kim currently works at in the Violence and Society Centre as the Knowledge Exchange Manager.

We're really pleased to welcome them all on board and can't wait to start working together once we've all made it to the other side of the summer holidays!

You can see who is who on the governance page of our new website - https://changingrelations.co.uk/about/governance/

20/08/2026

In the light of the horrendous treatment of Jason Arday, we want to give a particular shout out today to the . We recently attended a working group led by that was focused on changing public attitudes through practical learning and awareness.

What has impressed us since first encountering this organisation towards the start of this year, is the humanity and openness they are ready to show even to those who would send them a torrent of abuse.

They resolutely do not want to remain within their own echo chamber of supporters and want to find a way to reach people who express racist attitudes and behaviours where they are, in the recognition that this is how you have a chance of encouraging people to shift their views.

This absolutely echoes the approach we have always tried to take at Changing Relations in regards to gender-based violence and we're really hopeful as to what we can achieve in this positive proactive coming together to make the North East a region that actively opposes racism.

Take a look at the Become the Bridge campaign - https://northeastantiracism.org.uk/become-the-bridge/

17/08/2026

here

I want to reflect on the media coverage of Jason Arday. Much has been written on it, but as an educator, my mind turns to how we build a kinder society through education.

First, big love to all my Black friends & connections who are hurting in the face of the systemic racism evident in this case. It is heartbreaking for someone to be pushed beyond their limits in such a callous way. These are not the "British values" I want for my country.

As I gained insight into the provenance of the claims seized upon by a savage press, the 2 ingredients that feel missing are critical thinking & empathy.

So many news articles use the passive voice - "Claims were made..." - a useful way of obfuscating responsibility. It makes you focus on the person something is happening to.

So it took some time for me to see that it was a fundamentally racist person making the plagiarism claims so many seized upon.

It feels problematic to allow ourselves to run away with "news" items based on the passive voice without interrogating who is saying what & why.

It's not that we don't have the ingredients for critical thinking in our education system.

In English, children learn about writing to persuade & an author's purpose. What effect do they want to have on their audience? What do they want to convince us of? In History, they learn to critique sources. Are they reliable? Is propaganda at play?

So what's missing?

1. Critical thinking & empathy need to go hand-in-hand so we teach our children to consider how our behaviour impacts others, encouraging empathy for those who are hurting, to notice how others are & offer support.

2. When education is focused on exams, learning risks becoming geared towards that, so even if we critique an author's intention, the focus is on capturing this as exam technique rather than applying it to our lives.

If we want education to develop young people to be in the world as well as the workplace, we need to create space to reflect on social attitudes. To build adults who ask what is the story? What is the motivation behind it? Who will it impact? Is the intention kind or destructive? Is this the bandwagon I want to jump on?

30/07/2026

here...

I'm a bit full of the love for the team this week.

Today it's a massive shout out to and .

Oh my days have they worked hard on creating the educator toolkits for our domestic abuse-themed learning programmes - A is for Amy and Sometimes it Hurts!!!!!

In my role, I tend to modulate between working on a strategic level, being out there, developing relationships, planning for our development as an organisation and, here and there, being really in the detail of project delivery.

I was very much in the thick of our educator consultation process back in the autumn and supporting our fab creative facilitation team to develop the schemes of work they would go on to trial in the winter.

Then there was a period of a good few months where most of my time was on funding bids, developing and trialing some smaller new programmes of work, whilst these two absolute beauts worked incredibly hard taking all the learning from our pilot programme delivery and translating that into detailed step-by-step lesson instructions to enable teachers and youth workers to be able to deliver our programmes for themselves from this autumn coming.

Having been very much out of the detail for all that time, when I finally got to reviewing the A is for Amy toolkit last week in the final stages of getting ready to hand over to our fab designer , I was absolutely blown away.

The detail. The thoroughness. The depth of facilitator notes to help educators get their heads around how to handle potentially tricky conversations on a definitely tricky topic.

So impressed. So proud. And absolutely can't wait to see them in print!

Gan on lasses!!!

Image credit:

26/07/2026

here.

Last week saw the final board meeting with our absolute stalwart before she steps down from her role as Non-Exec Director, paving the way for 3 new Non-Exec Directors to join and I in the Autumn.

(This is not goodbye to Rachael thankfully 🥰 She is shifting to a Business Development Manager role thanks to Durham Business Growth Funds via Business Durham and we are super excited for this next chapter in our working relationship)

I will introduce you to our new Non-Exec Directors soon I promise.

But before I do, I want to take a moment to thank Rachael for her support in this role.

Rachael joined our board 4 years ago at a time when I was really low in confidence. She brought a profound & nuanced understanding of the sectors across which we operate, the nature of a voluntary sector organisation & its funding structure & what we were trying to achieve as an arts education company. She understood that things are often uncertain but that that doesn't mean you can't chart a path through that terrain. Her insight helped me map our plans against the wider political, economic & social landscape.

For me, personally, as an ADHDer who very much does not think in straight lines, *really* struggles with routine & finds formality incredibly uncomfortable, she highlighted all of the ways in which I am doing the things I am supposed to be doing, even where they do not look how one might expect. If you've ever seen my note-taking, you'll know what I mean! Many comment that it astounds them I make sense of the scribbles, circles & arrows that scorch the page! But I do make sense of them.

And it makes all the difference to have someone who sees you, believes in you, stands by you & reassures you. Who is able to offer critical insight in a way that is also kind & supportive. It's hard in the voluntary sector. You live with perpetual uncertainty. You need bolstering to be able to keep on keeping on. And Rachael has bolstered me enormously over the last 4 years.

Thank you Rachael. You rock!!!

Image credit

Changing Relations

18/09/2026

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