UKDPC's Together! 2012 festival ended up on a high note with a party at The Hub in Canning Town. Partygoers enjoyed performances by Mik Scarlet, Penny Pepper, Marcus Barr and Angry Fish, along with an Open Mike slot.  

Despite losing our main venue and production partner, London Pleasure Gardens, three days into the Olympics, in the past five months Together! 2012 has: 

• Created a participatory cultural programme, led entirely by volunteers, bringing together disabled people of all ages, from every impairment group and from a wide range of ethnic and cultural backgrounds;
• Showcased the work and talents of 45 locally based disabled artists, in exhibitions at Eastside Community Heritage's pop-up museum and gallery in Stratford in August and at the Hub for Disability History Month;
• Involved 31 locally based disabled people in arts workshops covering poetry, storytelling, photography, film-making, wheelchair dance and crafts (as well as people from further afield).
• Brought in nine international disabled artists and five UK-based disabled artists to share their work and act as role models.
• Organised four exhibitions; a three-day film festival; and six events involving live performances;
• Delivered this work in 12 locations spread throughout the borough;
• And produced this with 25 official partners, including London Borough of Newham and East London NHS Foundation Trust.
• Festival participants also created ten pieces of mail art for exhibition by Cooltan Arts, over 50 poems (many of which were performed live at our Pop-Up Cafe and have been published online), festive cards and decorations, and a short film funded by Channel 4 which will be available on our website in the New Year.

Disability Arts Online has described the festival as: "A launch pad rocketing culture in Newham to the skies." It said of our re-launch event for Disability History Month: "The community is intact here. It shares a glory in the achievement of work well done, well presented and a festival well-organised." 

UKDPC would like to thank Artistic Director Dr Ju Gosling aka ju90, Young Producer Malini Shah, Poetry and Spoken Word Producer Sarah Hughes, and key volunteers Dawn Barber, Blake Gibbons, Georgia Drysdale and Des Blake, as well as all of the artists involved and our partner organisations. 

Together! 2012 has highlighted the significant demand for an ongoing participatory Disability Arts programme, as well as the potential to promote Newham as the most diverse and accessible borough in the country and to facilitate it to become an international centre of excellence for Disability Arts. UKDPC is therefore intending to work with the LBN micro-enterprise team in the New Year to set up a new organisation led by disabled people to take forward the work, including continuing to run an annual festival in Disability History Month.