FINALIST 2025
A rousing chorus for justice, fairness and societal change by Artistic Director and joint CEO of Cardboard Citizens, Chris Sonnex, performed by Shahab Awad together with Community Company.
“If the people in charge were up to the job, their conscience could never preside over a society that allowed profit margins over people, housing markets over families, data over caring.”
242,000 households in the UK are experiencing the most severe forms of homelessness – rough sleeping, living in cars, squats, tents, sofa-surfing, or in temporary and unsuitable accommodation. Over 100,000 households are living in conditions that fail to meet basic needs that’s a larger population than Brixton, Camden, Notting Hill and Hackney combined.
The reality is that homelessness isn’t just an individual struggle—there is a societal responsibility to change the narrative.
More Than One Story is a series of nine monologue films exploring the multiple realities of homelessness. More people than ever are facing homelessness in the UK today. With core homelessness rates projected to be 20% higher in 2024 than 2020, hundreds of thousands of people across the country have no place to call home. Each of their stories is different.
A co-production with Black Apron Entertainment and in partnership with the Big Issue, More Than One Story aims to shine a light on the diverse intersectional factors that cause and exacerbate homelessness.
By sharing narratives about the different forms of homelessness from sofa surfing, overcrowded living and temporary accommodation and the experiences of queer, Black and migrant communities, these stories aim to amplify voices often overshadowed by the statistics.
Written and performed by 18 artists and Cardboard Citizens Members, each with their own lived experience of homelessness, poverty or inequity and filmed at London’s Hoxton Hall.
Cardboard Citizens has been creating life-affirming theatre with people experiencing homelessness, poverty or inequity for over 30 years. Find out more about our work here.
Cardboard Citizens aims to create space for people in society through engaging & unlocking the life changing and unlimited possibilities of theatre and art. We do it with a conscious heart, soul & brain for, with and by the people that don’t feel like they have a home because of lived experience of homelessness, poverty, or societal inequity. We engage deeply and creatively with the injustices of our society, and we invite everyone to play a part.
Cardboard Citizens creates work with and for people who experience homelessness, inequity, or poverty. We provide theatre/art/training that explores, interrogates, and challenges the injustices that are most alive in our world. We believe that theatre and art can transform, that it can challenge the individual to grow and ignite a fire in the belly of wider society to change.
When you make work or train with us, you create a shared and determined belief that our work, our voices, our lives will never cease to be important, we will make sure that they never cease to be heard. Together we create a world that we want to see, a world where you can challenge what the world said you should achieve and be, a world where art is seen as one of the most important things that we humans can create, that the barriers that stop people making art are dismantled and taken down together. That the walls that stop us accessing equity are demolished so that we together can see & create our version of justice. All while making or learning to make the most incredible art that has ever been made.
Your art.
When you watch our work, it activates you to feel, to empathise or to open your eyes to the injustices that are most alive in our world. We offer you a choice to challenge the stereotypes, preconceived notions, and thoughts you didn’t even know you had and personally continue that growth in your everyday life, individually and then as a community. Our work will bring more people closer together to make new citizens, ones that aren’t defined by borders, governments, and laws, but by the communal want to be a better world because if you don’t stand for something, you will fall for anything.
We are all Cardboard Citizens.
We align with the following UN Sustainable Development Goals:
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