Image credit: Culture Collective activity, @strangerandfiction and @jazgradyartist
With over a decade of experience in senior roles across the Scottish charity and arts sectors, Kathryn Welch is a cultural leader, specialising in community development, strategic planning and place-based social change.
In this guest blog, commissioned as part of Culture Commons’ open policy development programme on devolution and increased local decision making, Kathryn reflects on her experience as Programme Lead for the Culture Collective programme, a powerful network of 26 community-rooted creative projects across Scotland initiated by Creative Scotland.
While working as a freelancer at the time of writing, Kathryn was recently appointed Interim Director of Culture Counts – a network of arts, heritage and creative industries organisations and a core partner on the open policy development programme.
Back in 1998, as an opinionated and precocious twelve year-old in Bolsover, a former mining town in Derbyshire, I wrote to the Editor of our local newspaper, The Derbyshire Times. In an impassioned letter, I protested plans to demolish our (long closed) swimming pool and replace it with an Assembly Rooms. An earlier edition of the newspaper had suggested some of the sorts of exciting cultural events that residents could expect to grace the new Assembly Rooms, mentioning a programme of musical recitals, concerts and performances by renowned actors. Twelve-year old me was unimpressed by their suggestions, writing boldly in my letter to the Editor that “I hate brass bands, don’t like choirs and haven’t heard of Judi Dench”.
My parents were apparently startled to learn about my foray into political journalism when a neighbour leaned over the fence and dryly said “I see your Kathryn’s in the paper”, and the story’s only improved in light of my subsequent career coordinating and advocating for community arts initiatives. I’ve stumbled across that newspaper clipping periodically over the years, and whilst it never fails to make me cringe, it’s also come to serve as a useful reminder of what it is to try to ‘bring culture’ to a community. Even the most well-intentioned initiatives will run up against diverging opinions about what kind of cultural provision a place might want or need, including - but certainly not limited to, mouthy local pre-teens.
Fast-forward 25 or so years, and I’m immersed in the leadership of Culture Collective, Creative Scotland’s flagship participatory arts programme. The programme is intended to invest in a cultural landscape across Scotland that is designed and driven by the communities in which it is rooted. It feels like an opportunity to do better by today’s versions of that opinionated 12 year old, and their parents and grandparents, and to support a creative and cultural sector that is more genuinely shaped by the interests, passions, questions and talents of local communities.
With a network of 26 creative projects, and almost 500 artists and creative practitioners, we embarked on a gigantic experiment to explore what it takes to invest in a creative landscape that speaks from, to and of the diversity of Scotland’s people and places. It was a rare and precious investment of significant scale in community-led creative practice, committing £10m to collaborative, participatory arts projects across Scotland, alongside funding for a network of peer-support, development opportunities, learning and sharing.
It was an opportunity to test in practice what works when it comes to giving local communities a greater say in what happens in their place, enabled by a funding process designed to be flexible, to embrace uncertainty and change (especially in the context of the Covid-19 pandemic, from which Culture Collective funding emerged), and centring the needs of both artists and communities at its heart.
In light of these experiences, I’ve been invited to share some thoughts and learning to feed into Culture Common’s work on the future of local cultural decision making, with a particular focus on considering how more localised decision making might impact the UK's creative, cultural and heritage ecosystem.
Any fledgling aspiration to include more people in local decision-making very quickly runs up against the issue of participation. Culture Commons’ research paper What do the public think about the future of local cultural decision making? identifies that people don’t always have capacity or interest in taking on the realities of local decision-making processes, and rightly notes the complexities involved with handling local politics, divisions and dominant personalities. I think there’s something else at play here, too.
One of the problems, when thinking about how to increase local representation and decision-making, is that the (excellent) intentions so often turn out to be arm-gnawingly boring in practice. Very few of us are excited by the ‘opportunity’ to attend more meetings, especially when we’re not paid to do so, and particularly where those meetings revolve around budgets, administration and arguing with people we don’t much like. It’s cultural engagement as eat-your-vegetables; you might not like it, but it’ll be good for you. Culture Commons' discussion paper on defining effective public involvement in cultural decision making makes this point especially clearly on the matter of Community Asset Transfers, which all too-often act to transfer not just ownership, but also costs, risks and administrative burden from Local Authorities to local people. A brilliant former-colleague of mine once put it simply: “these buildings have been neglected for so long that by the time they’re offered for sale they’re not community assets, they’re community liabilities”.
Community halls and public spaces are fundamental to cultural provision - they are not just performance spaces, but places to organise meetings, to offer services, to celebrate, protest or mourn together. But wanting access to such a space isn’t the same as wanting (or being equipped) to manage the intensive process of legal ownership, financial responsibility and practical management of often leaky and poorly-maintained buildings. “Sometimes”, as one exasperated parent told me in Cumnock, “you don’t want to run a building, you just want to be able to book somewhere for a bloody birthday party”.
The same discussion paper identifies the risks of entrenching inequalities that results from the “you want it, just own it” mentality, with better-resourced communities more able to leverage the energy, connections and labour necessary to manage the ownership of community buildings, whilst those already thinly-stretched are increasingly at risk of losing access to communal spaces altogether. This is not to say that Community Asset Transfer is a bad thing, rather that it’s problematic where it’s offered as the only solution for communities to retain access to public spaces.
So, if not more meetings, and not more administration, then what might an alternative approach to community-led decision-making look like?
One of the great successes of Culture Collective was to bring artists in to lead every stage of working with communities, right from the outset of projects. It’s more common to see creative initiatives designed by organisations, with artists brought in at the delivery stage, where opportunities to creatively influence the fundamental design of a project are more limited. In this case, the increased role for artists was practically enabled by the funding criteria, which required that at least 50% of funds be allocated to artist fees. Culture Collective emerged in the context of the Covid-19 pandemic, and the focus on creating substantial, paid roles for creative practitioners was a response to the impact of lockdown on employment opportunities for freelancers.
In practice, the knock-on effect of this funding stipulation was that more artists were meaningfully involved throughout the consultation, design and delivery of projects, resulting in increased opportunities for communities to participate in ways that were both meaningful and robust, and engaging, creative and enjoyable. At the same time, organisational partners could bear more of the administrative and legislative burden of projects, leaning into their position to better handle partnership agreements, legal contracting and financial processes.
Culture Collective artists worked with children, older people, sports teams, schools, new parents, women’s groups and food banks, drawing maps, taking walking tours, exploring archives and writing poetry to explore what forms locally-led creative provision might take. In Stranraer, artist Hope London invited locals to share their aspirations for the redevelopment of neglected, boarded-up and derelict buildings in the town centre, collected via interviews, collage, colouring books and visual prompts. The community’s hopes, dreams, anger and frustrations eventually came together in What Could Happen Here? - a delightfully-catchy music video set to a retro synth track featuring their words, drawings and ideas. This diverse and sometimes unconventional approach to project design was enabled in the case of Culture Collective via a funding application that focussed on process, rather than product. Applicants were asked to think deeply about how they would come to understand what a community wanted, with the subsequent creative outputs acknowledged as necessarily flexible, unknown and likely to evolve as the process of getting to know one-another progressed.
So often, funding applicants are asked to describe, even guarantee, a particular creative output (with associated quantitative targets for participation) before the project has even begun. Whilst intended to reduce the risk and provide an element of certainty for funders, this approach to funding design virtually guarantees the exclusion of local people from the more meaningful elements of initial project design. In contrast, if application processes can embrace the necessarily unknowable outcomes of working in tandem with an ever-evolving network of community-based collaborators, then opportunities can open up for thoughtful, responsive and enjoyable consultation processes. It seems so basic, and yet is so often missed - if we’d like people to be more involved in local decision-making, can we make it fun for them to do so?
Culture Commons paper What do the public think about the future of local cultural decision making? includes the observation that, for many people interviewed, “there is limited association of creativity with culture”. The paper found that people are deeply invested in their sports teams, local traditions, food festivals and heritage buildings, but often see those as something separate to creativity, which is imagined to be confined to art galleries and theatre stages. We have come to associate creativity (which sounds so much grander, and even more exclusionary, if we call it ‘the arts’) with a very particular kind of activity, activity which is deeply associated with the middle and upper classes, with particular art forms (opera and ballet being the oft-cited examples), and with the experiences of those in cities and so-called ‘central’ parts of the country.
This reflects, I think, the way that public arts funding, and many of our national institutions, have prioritised their attention, and our sector’s (ironic) lack of imagination about the breadth of what culture and creativity looks like in practice. This leaves a vast number of people underrepresented in what we consider to be our creative sector, not because they’re lacking in creative talent or activity, but because their stories don’t necessarily align with a predetermined idea of what cultural output looks like. Perhaps they use first languages other than English, perhaps their expertise is in a highly niche or almost-forgotten artform, perhaps their stories are unfamiliar to the majority of those in decision-making roles. This is a fascinating, exciting opportunity for a richer, more vibrant and more diverse creative landscape.
At a knowledge exchange session led by Culture Commons, Creative Lives put forward a much wider and more authentic vision of creativity, one that embraces cookery, gardening, crafting and the ‘amateur’ (here meaning non-professional, noticing the highly inaccurate but all-too-common trend of equating the term with sub-standard). This kind of creativity is deeply, inescapably entwined with culture - it’s about who we are, where we come from, who we know, what kind of places we live in and how we connect with the people around us.
Inviting more people to shape cultural decision making requires - indeed depends upon - a concurrent willingness to widen our ideas about what we consider to be worthwhile in terms of creative and cultural values. Culture Collective projects embraced creative productions far beyond the traditional output of arts institutions, joyfully encompassing sandcastle building, protest banners, letter writing, community gardening, storytelling on riverbanks, seed collecting and more.
Too often, faced with impossible funding decisions in a context of one of the lowest proportions of budget devoted to arts funding in Europe, our creative sector has based allocation of these all-too sparse funds on “funding what is already funded, rather than funding what it is that the majority of people might like to do”. If the people of Stranraer, or Alloa, or Forres decline to go and appreciate the art that has been funded on their behalf, well, we have been lulled into believing, then this reflects a lack of taste or effort on their part. In such an environment, it’s hardly surprising that many people have mentally separated creative initiatives from their everyday cultural lives, and it’s not much of a step from there to separate ourselves from creativity altogether.
Looking back at my letter to the Derbyshire Times, what strikes me is the extent to which I’d assigned myself to Team Swimming, rather than Team Arts (and that those two things should ever be considered in opposition to one-another, anyway). In reality, I was a deeply creative child - forever with my nose in a book, always cutting, glueing, stitching and sticking, and never without a whole Argos catalogue’s worth of candle-making / plaster-of-paris-modelling / stained-glass-painting / dream-catcher-making craft kits on every Christmas and birthday list. At school, though, I was rubbish at copying famous paintings by long-dead artists that made up the vast majority of the Art curriculum, and despite determinedly tooting away on the clarinet for seven agonising years, never got beyond the stage of having to write the letters of the notes beneath the lines of sheet music.
It was a local charity, Junction Arts, that reassured me that my kind of creativity was valid too. A tiny and fledgling organisation then, and delightfully still going strong in Bolsover today, they organised a rich programme of creative activity for local kids, culminating in a huge and gloriously chaotic lantern festival each autumn. There, our willow and tissue-paper creations were bourne proudly aloft along the high street, lit from inside by tealights that seemed either to go out with every breath of wind, or alternatively to set their entire wood-and-paper-based host alight, punctuating the parade with the delighted horror of small children holding tightly onto a raging inferno. It was wondrous, chaotic, creative fun, and a vital step on my own personal recruitment to Team Arts.
Now coming up to their 50th year of operation in and around Bolsover, and having significantly expanded the scale and ambition of their operation, Junction Arts exemplify what it is to commit long-term to the cultural life of a place. And it is here so that many other structural initiatives - Culture Collective included - are found wanting.
Government processes have so far not found a way to make long-term funding commitments to places, failing to recognise that the needs of people’s lives and communities simply do not align with short-term political cycles. Again, the bearing of risk is shifted, from those who hold power and budgetary responsibility, to people and communities. Funding commitments of one, two, or at-best three years will always mean precarity for those trying to work meaningfully with locally-led processes, and result in poorer: less certain, less ambitious, less visionary provision for communities.
Junction Arts, who’ve managed to navigate a patchwork of local, national and trust funding sources over their almost five-decades, can now track three generations of Bolsover people who’ve participated in their lantern parade, which has grown over the decades to be bigger, bolder - and slightly more health and safety conscious. Last year’s parade featured a glowing tissue paper lantern in the shape of Buzz Lightyear, wings stretching almost the width of the high street, fist outstretched as he proudly led many hundreds of local families in a celebration of their creativity.
Long term funding commitments can result in more of this work, in more places, and liberate creative people and organisations to spend more time making work, rather than investing huge proportions of their energy, time and all-too-scarce resources writing funding applications and repeatedly making the case for support.
Whilst Bolsover today is thriving, thirty years ago it felt like a town struggling with the loss of its core industry, and without a clear vision of its future. The town’s pit closed in 1993, marking the end of 100 or so years not just of employment, but of social provision, housing and community identity. Culture Commons’ insight paper on local cultural decision making in ‘left-behind areas’ tackles the language policy makers use to talk about places across the country that have struggled to thrive in the face of a changing economy, rejecting the sense of shame and lack inherent in phrasing like “cultural deserts”, or “deprived” and “marginalised” area.
Nonetheless, investment in place-making is deeply political, and the identification of ‘left behind’ places is still imbued with a euphemistic passive-voice over any sense of responsibility for addressing the inequalities caused by long-term underinvestment in the industries, infrastructures and resources of communities that were marginalised by the forward-march of capitalism and de-industrialisation.
Just as this lack of investment took place over decades, generations, to create both deep societal inequalities and a creative sector that prioritises the cultural sensibilities of some people over others, so too will the counter-movement require long-term commitment. Long-term, intergenerational inequality within and between our places cannot be solved with short-term projects or sporadic investment. In fact, such initiatives risk doing more harm than good, demanding energy and participation from local people, raising hopes and aspirations only to move on or quietly fold after a year or two. One understandably pissed off-sounding local resident is quoted in Culture Commons’ Left Behind Areas insight paper with their response to an invitation by a local authority officer to get involved in conversations about ‘culture-led regeneration’: “There is no point having this conversation”, they said. “We've had it a million times before. It never goes anywhere”.
I was want to conclude this blog with a sense of what next - some thoughts on where future action or research might usefully focus.
If we’re serious about giving people and communities a meaningful say about what cultural life in their places look like, then rather simply, we need to start putting our money where our mouth is, and committing it there long term. People are tired of, or simply disconnected from, endless circular conversations about what it might take to ‘empower’ them to take greater ownership of their places.
Culture Collective in Scotland, the Creative Places initiative in Ireland, and a whole host of locally-rooted, community-engaged organisations like Junction Arts have explored in practice what it takes to shape creative provision around the needs and opportunities of our places. In doing so, they have designed exciting, engaging, interesting methodologies for giving people real say over decisions, without having to sit through endless meetings or take responsibility for the ownership of cumbersome, neglected and demanding buildings. They have navigated the complexity of the communities they’re part of, joining campaigns for better transport infrastructure, partnering with health and social care institutions, and tackling disagreement and division with care, sensitivity and tact. They help people turn ideas into action, delivering tangible activity in communities, and helping to make people’s lives more connected, more colourful, healthier and more inclusive.
The work has been done, evaluations published, plaudits and congratulations offered at the highest levels of government. And we know the problems they face in continuing their work: short term funding cycles, a lack of political and financial commitment to community-rooted activity, and resources being disproportionately awarded to those who shout the loudest, or who have the most influential friends, or who can write the nicest funding applications. We now need to move, and move rapidly, from talking about the problems with community-led decision making, to investing in the solutions.
Our experts already exist, they’re leading this work and have been doing so with great success. Instead of watching them struggle on, making do with the dregs of funding, underpaid staff and financial uncertainty, then convening another discussion about how we might possibly do better, we need to be asking what’s stopping the solutions being realised.
What would it take to commit to long-term (i.e. 10 year plus) funding of cultural activity for, by and with local communities?
Why haven’t we already mainstreamed and prioritised funding streams that broaden our definitions of culture, offer time and space for communities to explore what their own vision of locally-led creativity might look like, and commit long-term to the messy processes required for communities to try, experiment, re-think and work things out together?
To slightly reappropriate the words of that local resident, “there’s no point having this conversation again”. If we’re serious about prioritising local voices and investing in locally-rooted creative activity, it’s beyond time to move from warm words to cold hard cash.
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