Our new client GamCare

We are pleased to announce that we are now working with our new client GamCare, the leading provider of information, advice and support for anyone affected by gambling harms.

GamCare was founded in 1997 by Paul Bellringer and recently celebrated its 25 years anniversary. It is a unique organisation that brings together creating awareness around safer gambling, treatment to this form of addiction and the support for its affected others.

Supporting them is both exciting and refreshing, as we delve into a relatively new landscape and learn more about this area. Our task looks to build on their Equality, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI) work to date and help support them strategically in achieving their inclusion aims over the coming years.

To find out more information about GamCare and to follow their work on EDI in the coming months, please visit here.

Welcome to Akiko Takizawa

We are pleased to announce that joining PILAA’s creative leg of the business, is the acclaimed London based Japanese photographer, Akiko Takizawa. Takizawa’s body of work has taken on many themes, which include: home, family, a sense of loss, displacement, death and the afterlife, and what it means to live in the modern world. The majority of her work also focuses on her home country, where Japanese culture and traditions feature strongly.

Takizawa’s recent craftswomanship also centers around the 150-year-old Collotype printing process, which originated in France, but has now been all but discontinued on a worldwide level. In 2014 she received the prestigious 2014 Prix HSBC pour la Photographie and has continued to show nationally and internationally.

As part of the PILAA team, she will be lending her craft to our EDI campaigns. In particular she takes part in advocacy work in helping to break the cycle of homelessness, challenging violence towards women and girls, and unpacking interconnected forms of oppression and social justice work. As she told us, it’s because I’ve often felt excluded, that I’ve made work with the desire to belong. 

 

Headland #2, Gelatine silver print, 2007. 

Wedding up in Heaven #5, (2011) 

For members, look out for her work in your monthly EDI calendar and yearly subscription of images. For non-members or anyone looking to work with Akiko on your next EDI social justice campaign, get in contact with us to see how we can help.

A Message From Our CEO

Welcome to the launch of our new website which marks a turning point for our organisation. Pre-image Learning and Action (PILAA) was conceived as an idea back in 2015. Our hope was that we would be a company that could tie in making a difference to organisations and the people we work with, by using the visual arts to unlock the bigger picture. We never imagined the impact that a combination of these two factors would have upon people’s everyday lives. 

From working with our earliest clients, we could see that there was a need for employers to support their staff and navigate through difficult conversations around common equality, diversity and inclusion (EDI) themes, as well as those not typically talked about. Our clients knew what they wanted to do but didn’t know how to do it. They were nervous in getting it wrong, yet just needed that little bit of expert support to help them lead the way. By having  an open and honest friendly conversation with them, we managed to understand their challenges and the context in which they operated in. Fast-forward to today, these relationships have helped to build on who we are and what we do. PILAA prides itself as an organisation that genuinely wants to make a difference to everyone we work with, hence why most of the people that we serve have found us organically, through word-of-mouth recommendations. 

Joining us on our mission to make a difference to the EDI community, we are excited to announce that we have expanded our team of experts. In addition, we also wanted to take this opportunity, to let you know of our PILAA Friend Memberships, which we launched in May 2022. 

From us, you can expect everything we do to follow our five key values, which are embodied through the acronym FOCUS: Fun, Open-Mindedness, Creativity, Understanding and Sincerity. If you are reading this and have signed up to our newsletter, then this is your first step to being part of the PILAA ecosystem.

Dr Ope Lori