Creative Workforce Workshops: Place
We co-designing policy alongside freelance, self-employed and atypical workers operating in the creative and cultural sectors and commissioning news works of art to support advocacy.
Our new ‘Creative Workforce Workshops’ series has been launched to keep the voices of people working in the UK's creative and cultural sectors elevated and provide material for ongoing advocacy efforts across DCMS subsectors.
In more recent years, Culture Commons has been working with trade unions, local and combined authorities, universities, sector leaders and key policy makers to co-design policy and lead national advocacy campaigns to improve standards for some of the most dynamic and dedicated, yet under-supported, workers in the UK economy.
Check out the 'Creative Workforce Workshops: Place' hub to get more information on all aspects of the workshops, view the digital version of the report and explore the commisioned artworks too.
The connection between the creative and cultural sectors, local democracy and the economy of place is gaining much more attension amongst local decision makers. Central and local government policy increasingly points towards the important relationship between thriving creative and cultural sectors and successful local, place-based regeneration.
That's why we have focussed the first report of ‘Creative Workforce Workshops’ series on ‘Place’. We hope that by tying policy considerations around place and workforce together, we can draw out observations on the lived experiences of creatives living and working in different parts of the country to see what we might discover. We pose the question:
What is it like to be a freelance, self-employed or atypical worker in the creative and cultural sectors in different parts of the UK today?
We hope this our newly published digital report, and the new art works we commissioned from local artists in response to the conversations, will complement the considerable efforts already being made by trade unions, subsector networks, trade bodies and individual practitioners. Above all, we hope this work will provide fresh insights into place-based working and help keep the lived experiences of freelancers at the centre of the national and local policy discourse for some time come.
