Maryhill Integration Network celebrates 25 years with an exhibition in Maryhill

For a quarter of a century, Maryhill Integration Network has been bringing people together in the north west of Glasgow. Now the grassroots charity is marking its 25th anniversary year with a free exhibition just down the road at Maryhill Burgh Halls.

This is what community looks like runs until Friday 18 December at the Halls on Gairbraid Avenue. It opened on 23 October and shares a selection of items from the network's own community archive, gathered and catalogued with support from the Scottish Council on Archives.

Since 2001, Maryhill Integration Network, known as MIN, has been welcoming folk who have come to Maryhill from all over the world alongside neighbours whose families have lived there for generations. Its aim is to create positive social change by providing a welcoming space and opportunities for connection and collaboration across communities, with a particular focus on supporting refugees, people seeking asylum and migrants.

The exhibition is much more than paperwork. Alongside photographs, newsletters and press cuttings, visitors will find pottery, a huge handmade banner, prints, zines, poetry pamphlets, recipe books and graphic novels, all made by people taking part in MIN's creative groups and projects over the years. As the Halls put it, each piece started with people getting together, sharing their stories and making something new.

MIN hopes the archive will be useful to researchers, activists and anyone interested in community building and migrant solidarity in Glasgow, describing the exhibition as tangible evidence of a community thriving together.

The anniversary year has brought national recognition too. Museum of Things, a project developed by MIN with the Hunterian at the University of Glasgow, has been shortlisted for the Best Museums Change Lives Project Award from the Museums Association. Through weekly sessions, people with lived experience of migration worked directly with the Hunterian's collections, reinterpreting objects through storytelling and making sculptural, 2D and audiovisual work that was placed in the museum's permanent galleries.

The Museums Association says the project improved wellbeing and fostered belonging among participants, while audiences reported a better understanding of cultural diversity. The awards are presented at a ceremony during the association's annual conference this November.

Entry to the exhibition is free and everyone is welcome. It is open from 10am to 5pm on weekdays, with weekend opening too, and Maryhill Burgh Halls has wheelchair access and accessible toilets. As the Halls say, it is a celebration of what a community can do together, and a reminder that MIN's story is still being written.