Winners of Clarion Housing Group’s William Sutton Prize announced
Howard Lake | 28 March 2021 | News
Two projects that offer a novel service to benefit social housing residents and communities have been announced as the winners of the 2020 William Sutton Prize.
The winners were announced at a virtual ceremony on 25 March.
William Sutton Prize for Placemaking and Affordable Housing Design
The winner of The William Sutton Prize for Placemaking and Affordable Housing Design is Ecomotive and SNUG Homes’ proposal for a construction and training hub in Bristol that will enable residents to co-produce eco-friendly, modular housing in response to local needs. The project will also provide apprenticeship, volunteering and employment opportunities, as well as self-build training and support for community-led housing initiatives.
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The William Sutton Prize for Social Innovation
The Hackney School of Food, which opened in 2020, is a collaboration between charity Chefs in Schools, the LEAP Federation – made up of three state primary schools in Hackney – and architect Surman Weston that transformed an old building and area of disused land into a food education hub.
The hub helps primary school children benefit from food education and the local community receive free cooking classes, enabling children and adults to learn to grow fruit and vegetables, tend beehives, cook over fire and turn produce into meals.
The prize fund will be used to share the model with other schools to create nurturing environments for children to engage with food and growing.
Tom Walker, Head Food Educator at The Hackney School of Food, said: “Winning The William Sutton Prize is such an exciting moment for us as a team. The prize fund will make a huge difference to our plans, helping us to share our hugely successful model with other schools to enable more children and communities to benefit. We know that seeing where your food comes from and learning about healthy eating and cooking sets children up for life and we’re looking forward to working with Clarion to grow our concept further.”
Highly commended
The projects were selected from 154 applications, the most received to date in the three years of the prize. Not surprisingly, many of the finalists’ proposals were responding directly to the coronavirus pandemic.
Enable Ability was highly commended in the Social Innovation prize category. Its proposal is for a new service that helps people with anxiety access health, social care and education services through the use of immersive technology, including virtual tours, walk through videos and virtual reality. During the pandemic, the service has been developed and delivered by young autistic and disabled people, building in lived experience, and the £5,000 prize fund will help roll out the service and develop it further.
The seven-strong shortlist also included projects by The Social Change Nest, a business that has been supporting people-powered networks and grassroots groups since 2013, and The Parenting Apart Programme CIC, a specialist service supporting parents and children through conflict, separation and divorce.
Highly commended for the Placemaking and Affordable Housing Design category was a proposal by Editional Studio to create a ‘Roving Retrofit Workshop’ that will work with housing associations and residents to retrofit and upgrade their homes. The £5,000 prize fund will help develop the concept further, enabling residents to reduce their carbon consumption and energy bills through hands-on workshops and go on to train and qualify as green retrofit contractors.
The William Sutton Prize
The William Sutton Prize was developed by Clarion Housing Group to celebrate the legacy of its founder, William Sutton, as a 19th century innovator and philanthropist who bequeathed his fortune to improve the quality of social housing.
Clarion Housing Group is a social business, reinvesting its profits into building new homes and providing support and opportunities to residents through Clarion Futures, its charitable foundation. The prize funding is provided by Clarion Futures.
The winning entries were determined by a panel led by Clare Miller, Group Chief Executive of Clarion, and including Peter Holbrook CBE, CEO of Social Enterprise UK.
Clare Miller, Chief Executive of Clarion Housing Group, commented: “Giving children space and time to learn about food is a great way to sow the seeds of lifelong healthy eating habits, so we’re delighted that we’ll be working with the team behind The Hackney School of Food to enable more children to benefit from their innovative model. It’s been inspiring reviewing our record-breaking number of applications and, as always, my fellow judges and I had a very difficult job choosing our winners. I’m excited to see how they take their innovative ideas to the next level with our support.”
Peter Holbrook CBE, CEO of Social Enterprise UK, added:“Initiatives like the Hackney School of Food are vital in building stronger, more sustainable communities and have a huge role to play in reducing the inequalities of health, wealth and opportunities the pandemic revealed. Congratulations to all the organisations who made the shortlist, I look forward to seeing them grow, develop and increase their impact.”
Entries for 2021 William Sutton Prize
- Applications open for Clarion House Group’s William Sutton Prize (9 August 2021)
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About Howard Lake
Howard Lake is consultant editor of UK Fundraising. He founded the site in 1994 and successfully sold it in 2022. As director of Giving X Ltd he is exploring growing giving on a massive scale.
He is the founder of Fundraising Camp and co-founder of GoodJobs.