Accumulate - Empowering young people affected by homelessness through creativity

Accumulate is a charity that uses creativity to empower people affected by homelessness and fundraises for scholarships so that they can continue their creative education at college.

The DECAY zine is a "collision" and collaboration of drawings, images, words, poetry and writing made on the Accumulate creative workshops for people affected by homelessness. The idea behind DECAY is to create a zine that showcases the talents and creativity of people who may have been ignored by wider society but whose voice deserves to be heard and acknowledged. DECAY was never set out to be a "slick" magazine but chaotic and anarchic and to have a slightly random and disjointed feel about it. Something visually engaging and which has a creative rhythm to it.

"When we set up the DECAY workshops we set up a table with masses of art equipment, inspirational visual materials and reference material and we just "create' together with the workshop participants over an intense period of time. This way people come together with a purpose and communicate, collaborate and create together with this vision of an end goal - the published DECAY zine. They write and draw about their lives, experiences, aspirations and hopes - just like all other young people. It could be anything, from what their favourite food is, their life motto or even the journey to the workshop."

The resulting artwork from the DECAY workshops is then gathered together and designed up into the actual DECAY zine pages by graphic design students from Ravensbourne University London, who are Accumulate's education partners. The students are instructed to break all the graphic design rules, put different artwork and styles together, blow up or shrink text, work quickly and be as adventurous as possible - and this pure creative freedom is what makes DECAY zine special and provides it's orchestrated chaos! The contributors to each of these DECAY zines receive a portion of the profits from every DECAY poster or zine that is sold with the rest returning to Accumulate so that it can continue to run its creative workshops for people affected by homelessness.

We are proud to present a collection of posters designed by participants on the Accumulate workshops for the DECAY zine, you can now buy them through our website and help a young person to continue with their education.

For the full range click HERE
For more information on Accumulate and other projects they have currently going on, click HERE