Three Years of Colour, Culture and Community: What difference did Colours of Redbridge make? 

Written by Dr Martine Nurek, Senior Evaluator at Insight Alliance 

Over the last three years, Colours of Redbridge has transformed how art and culture are experienced across the borough – creating joyful, inclusive and community-led events that reached thousands of residents and brought neighbourhoods to life. 

The programme set out to tackle a well-known problem: for many people, arts and culture can feel inaccessible, expensive, or disconnected from their lives and identities. 

Colours of Redbridge responded by… listening. They held community conversations – called Here We Share workshops – where residents shared what they wanted to see in Redbridge. Those ideas grew into experimental ‘test’ projects and, by Year 3, into spectacular, large-scale cultural experiences – from a disability-led street parade to a rooftop immersive dining experience and the world’s first electric Truck Art tour. 

Our evaluation shows that the impact has been significant. Across the three years, Colours of Redbridge welcomed almost 150,000 attendees – and 93% came from communities that don’t usually engage in mainstream arts and culture. Almost everyone who completed our feedback survey reported feeling welcome, joyful, culturally represented, and safe at events (90%+). 

We heard from residents that the events brought colour and energy into local spaces, strengthened community connection, improved physical and mental wellbeing, and provided valuable opportunities for learning and development. Colours of Redbridge also created 253 new paid and volunteer roles in the borough, supporting residents to develop new skills, confidence, and connections. 

A key part of the programme’s success was its community-led approach to evaluation itself. Local residents co-designed the evaluation questions, collected feedback at events, and ensured that the process remained accessible and grounded in lived experience. As an evaluator, it’s been a privilege to be involved in genuinely co-produced research, where evaluation is done with – not to – communities. 

One of the programme’s Community Evaluators, Priya, captured perfectly what Colours of Redbridge is all about: “One of the biggest achievements has been bringing together people from different communities and helping them learn about each other’s food, festivals and cultures.” 

I’d like to personally thank our Community Evaluation Group and Data Collectors. Your insights and support helped us understand what matters most to people in Redbridge, and kept our work inclusive, authentic, and relevant throughout. 

If you’d like to know more, you can explore how Colours of Redbridge performed against its objectives over the three years below, and read a summary of the full evaluation report here. 

Every year, we gave Colours of Redbridge a progress score out of 5 (a star rating) for each objective. This score reflected both what worked well in the programme and what could be improved.