What we’re about
CRAFT is a skill-sharing workshop based on a narrowboat that cruises the Lower Lea/East London canals.
We bring skilled people together to host workshops on boat related skills and beyond.
We’re building a community where valuable skills are accessible, and where learning is mutually supportive, social and joyful.
Through this, CRAFT aims to collectively empower boaters (and non-boaters!) to fix, solve, create and experiment with confidence, no matter their existing skill set or background.
We want London’s boating community to be connected, resilient and resourceful. We want it to thrive!
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CRAFT operates on the concept of skill-sharing.
We don’t think that skills should be commodities, guarded behind institutions and paywalls, and valued only when they are monitisable.
For us, skills are a way of interactively relating to others and the world around us. They are tools needed for satisfying needs, solving problems, achieving dreams and building strong communities.
Above all, skills are things developed through and passed between us. They are not owned by individuals, but always a collective product of the process of sharing.
CRAFT is a space to enable this process of sharing.
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With the above in mind, CRAFT does not operate as a business.
Workshops are not about providing training on the way something is done, but about collectively developing the ability to reason, experiment and problem solve in order figure out how something can be done.
Workshops are structured by hosts, but participant-driven and non-hierarchical.
This is why we don’t charge for workshops. However, that doesn’t mean we don’t have costs to cover, like heating, supplying materials for workshops and covering hosts’ costs, too.
We cover these costs by accepting donations. Each workshop has a recommended donation amount based on the cost involved in hosting it.
If you’re ever feeling darn generous though, you can always donate through our donate page!
Who ‘we’ are
In a broad sense, ‘we’ is everyone who engages with us in the practice of skill-sharing and thriving on the canals.
In the less broad sense, there’re two of us who keep the organisation afloat: Adam and Raphael.
Adam has a background in environmental politics, and has worked on boats for the past 5 years. He’s a qualified Boat Safety Examiner and a co-founder of Theatreship. He began renovating boats with little previous experience and is mostly self-taught, so he knows a thing or two about the importance of experimentation and failure. Adam converted the front half of his narrowboat into a workshop for the purpose of beginning a skill-sharing workshop, which is where CRAFT now lives.
Raphael is a designer with a background in architecture and music. He sometimes works for an ecology charity, makes furniture, tiny homes and saunas. His passions are (but not limited to) community engagement and mutual aid, and believes the sharing of ideas and skills across disciplines is essential for growth. Approached by Adam with CRAFT (at that point unnamed) to co-found and run the workshop was music to his ears and, as a result, the organisation was born.
Crafting a future…
CRAFT launched in Summer 2024, and our community is getting stronger with every workshop.
But the current iteration of CRAFT is restricted by its size and resources. We didn’t want that to stop CRAFT from launching, but we do have strong ambitions and driving visions of CRAFT in a larger, more permanent space; something like a bigger boat on a mooring, or a bankside space.
In the near future, we’ll start a fundraising campaign to raise the money for this vision. In the meantime, we’d love for you to support us in any way you can. Come to workshops, run/suggest a workshop, follow our social media, or support us financially by donating. The stronger our community becomes, the better chance we stand of crafting a real future.
In