Old Fire Station internal Storytelling evaluation 2025 

 

It’s been really nice to reflect on my journey and see that OFS has been a touchstone and a constant in various ways which I hadn’t quite recognised before. I do feel there are probably some people who still feel like outsiders and don’t feel that this is a space that would welcome them for various reasons. I guess it’s a wider societal issue: Who is an artist? What does an artist look like? Why don’t people feel welcome in town, and what is it that makes this city so divided? It’s something a lot of my work is based around. OFS has provided a platform for a lot of it and helped me to expand my range and be a more diverse artist. It still feels to me one of the most welcoming, accessible and community-minded spaces in the city centre, by quite a long way. (Freelance artist) 

 

The story so far 

We first developed Storytelling in 2017 to explore the impact of our own work as an organisation. We had become frustrated with conventional evaluation methods that focused on quantitative indicators and outcomes selected in advance. We felt that these approaches failed to reflect the complexity of people’s experiences, got in the way of relationships that we had carefully built over time, and didn’t help us learn. People resented being given a feedback form after taking part in rich, long-lasting creative processes. 

The idea with Storytelling was that we would start by listening – allowing people to describe their experience in their own words in a way that made sense to them. That way, we would find out what actually happened for them, rather than just which bits of what happened we could fit into whatever pre-existing schema had been imposed by other authorities (e.g. funders) that were generally much more distant from the work. 

Storytelling changed the way we understood our work and led us to re-write our mission statement – placing good quality relationships at the heart of everything we do. We’ve since used it many times to learn about the work of the Old Fire Station, both on specific projects and in organisation-wide evaluations.  

It’s led us to think more deeply about how we embed learning in our organisational culture. Recently, we’ve collected stories throughout the year to find out how people across a wide range of our activities experienced working with us. 

 

This year’s project 

In 2024/25, we collected stories from people involved in different ways in our work. Our storytellers included artists, core and freelance staff, Crisis members, participants in our creative workshops, and staff from partner organisations.  

The picture that has emerged through this process is of an organisation that still places caring, nurturing relationships – an ethos of ‘human-friendliness’ – at the heart of everything it does. We are happy to hear that those we work with feel looked after, respected, and able to exercise agency in what they do. 

This principle extends to organisations as well – our relationships with Crisis and Damascus Rose Kitchen are at the core of the value that we create locally. These networks create openings for people from across Oxford – often people who have been excluded and made to feel unwelcome – to take part in activities in the city centre, to develop confidence and skills, to build careers, and to find community. 

The stories clearly revealed the divided nature of Oxford. For some storytellers, whether they were born and raised in the city or arrived from elsewhere, there was a strong feeling that this was not a place for them. Stark wealth inequality and demographic segregation make the city centre seem inaccessible. Our job at OFS is to counter this impression by providing a welcoming space, and the stories offer invaluable insights into where we have succeeded in this, and where we still have to make improvements. 

Many of those who did find a home in our building had truly transformative experiences, overcoming personal traumas, developing or rediscovering talents and passions, exploring their place in the city, and contributing to an essential narrative – the untold stories of Oxford that get lost beneath widely recognised stereotypes of affluence and elitism. This process has helped to reaffirm our role as a forum and a platform for the citizens of a city in which the ‘dreaming spires’ of an internationally renowned university overlook some of the most extreme economic inequality in the country. The stories remind us that the Hidden Spire of OFS is a place where people can deliberate, debate, and discover what it means to live in this complex and contradictory place. 

Themes of inequality and precarity also emerge very strongly in the stories of our artists. Working in creative industries is extremely challenging at the moment. Artists are often forced to subsidise projects with their own time and money, as grant funding is often not sufficient to cover what is required. This endangers the vitality and diversity of the sector as well as the wellbeing of individuals. The stories have therefore refocused our attention on what it means to support people doing this work. 

The outcome of these conversations will inform the focus of our work over the next few years. How do we preserve our principle of human friendliness in an economy that is often the very opposite? How do we deepen and broaden our partnerships with like-minded organisations? How do we use our privileged position in the city centre to create space for those who are usually ignored or excluded, so that Oxford’s understanding of itself can become more rooted in reality? How do we support people to engage in creative processes that help to illustrate or narrate that reality? And through this, how can we contribute to a more equitable distribution of power and resources in the city? 

 

You can read the full report, as well as a short version, here.