Learning Opportunities for Cultural Intermediaries – Ordsall Update

Back in 2010 when we first started thinking about this project, we had several chats with people who were interested in the term ‘cultural intermediary’. A common observation was that there were few training or professional development opportunities for people working in smaller arts and cultural organisations within communities. Our diary-keeping exercise carried out in Birmingham and Manchester/Salford in 2013 echoed this theme – a sense that much of the work of cultural intermediaries was ‘invisible’ and not valued in more traditional career paths.

We wanted to do something about this, as part of our ethos of ‘giving back’ within the project itself. This is where Kerry Wilson and her team at the Institute of Capital Culture in Liverpool step in. Kerry is offering cultural intermediaries a chance for professional development through taking a Masters-level module on Participatory Research, which is part of a course on Cultural Leadership. On completion of the module, participants will receive a 30 credit Certificate of Continuing Professional Development. You can find out more information by downloading the flyer here: Ideas4Ordsall_Training&Learning

To participate, you need to have an undergraduate degree, be working as a cultural intermediary (either paid or as a volunteer) and be able to commit time to doing the course. In Ordsall we already have several people signed up to see what this is all about but there are still a few places left. We will be arranging a first training day very shortly with Kerry so if you are interested and meet these criteria, read the flyer and get in touch with Kerry Wilson (K.M.Wilson@ljmu.ac.uk) to find out more.

The State of the Creative City

Back in July we held a focus group as part of the ongoing ‘Governance’ work package for the project. We had a great attendance, from organisations including Cornerhouse, Creative Concern, Salford City Council, Brighter Sound, Islington Mill, 42nd Street, Writing Lives, Z-Arts, PalmerSquared, TiPP, Let’s Go Global, BBC, Unconvention, Mancuniverse and the University of Salford. Many people already knew each other, but as it was the first time the project had brought them together, an initial ice-breaker from Karen let everyone introduce themselves and share their reasons for attending.

We focussed mainly on exploring current operating contexts and issues of connectivity and community engagement in Greater Manchester’s creative economy. Having invited participants from SURF’s ‘sister’ project on urban sustainability, the Greater Manchester Local Interaction Platform, funded by Mistra Urban Futures, we were also able to have a broader discussion about the discourse, policy and practice of the creative city and the relationship between creative and cultural organisations and the sustainability, in all its guises, of the city-region as a whole.

Karen asked the groups to choose a framework – either PESTLE (Political, Economic, Social, Technical, Legal, Ethical / Environmental) or SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats) and then three groups split up for discussion. One group emphasised the overall context and state of working within Greater Manchester. One group discussed ‘sustainability’ – though they made the persuasive point that siloing the debate on sustainability into a ‘special interest’ is a central part of the problem in integrating aspects of the urban agenda.

A broad ranging discussion ensued from which a number of themes emerged. Participants noted a series of strengths within the current operating context linked to the diversity and variety of creative organisations in the city. They noted that Greater Manchester is more connected now than it was five years ago and working better with different communities. However, this brings challenges as well as opportunities in terms of managing complexity, keeping track of who is doing what and smoothing the flows of knowledge in the sector.

The strength of leadership and brand were cited as success factors by some. However, others noted that reputation can create complacency and a gap between strategy and implementation. The distinct context of Greater Manchester was a factor here, with differences between the 10 local boroughs, uncertainties about how to engage and shape the emerging city-regional governance structures and ensure that the voices of multiple diverse creative and cultural organisations working with communities can be heard and valued. New forms of leadership were seen as necessary, which involve, engage and respect community interests, rather than the current ‘drawbridge mentality’.

Unsurprisingly, a strong economic imperative shaped the current priorities of different participants. Phrases included the need to ‘stay ahead’, overcome ‘project by project funding’, be more ‘commercially minded’ or ‘savvy’ and develop new economic models. Yet equally important was the articulation of different kinds of non-economic values – social, wellbeing, sustainability – which characterised cultural organisations engaged in addressing in meeting social and environmental aims. The passions, beliefs and commitment of individuals were widely acknowledged, but caution was also called for: ‘you shouldn’t build a system on the assumption of free labour’.

Looking forward, participants expressed the need for courage to adapt to changing circumstances, especially as the financial and political landscape is being reshaped in the context of cuts, austerity and local authorities’ defaulting to minimum statutory provisions. This ‘courage’ included joining up audiences and seeing the cultural sector as taking the lead, being brave enough to alter or even reject existing partnerships. Key themes included ‘cultural democracy’ and the ‘democratisation of talent’, as well as celebrating success through the sharing of good practices. Universities were seen to have an increasing role to play in the creative urban economy – good news for Laura Ager, whose PhD focuses on those issues; and a challenge for universities to think through what their role and value beyond the economic might be.

Participants were interested in making different arguments about cultural value – including the wellbeing agenda – and in learning from models overseas. South America was referenced by some as a country to watch for grassroots innovations. Our has started to create a context for this international learning through commissioning scoping papers – one of which is about Medellin in Colombia from Theresa Bean. You can see Phil’s summary presentation on from the recent Project Continuity Day here.

Overall, community engagement was seen to be facilitated in Greater Manchester’s cultural and creative sectors through collaboration, openness and partnerships, along with strong community and voluntary sector networks, innovation and activism. Yet participants were clear that the public sector needs to better recognise, understand and value the third sector as equals, with greater access to discussions at a senior level, via a range of media – not just technology; such as community summits or peoples’ assemblies.

Lunch and networking finished the session – along with an opportunity to look over the posters that had been produced for the Connected Communities programme summit which had taken place in Edinburgh in July.

This was the first focus group of the project and we were really grateful to everyone for coming, giving their time and expertise. Another focus group is planned for the end of the ‘Governance’ work package. Going by the quality and reach of discussions so far, we are really looking forward to it.

From Cape Town to London via Leeds and Birmingham

Tags

climate, environment, formal governance, international poverty

So much for sustainability, I seem to have spent a lot of time recently in transit, one way or another.

In March I was fortunate enough to travel to Cape Town with one of SURF’s other streams of work – the Greater Manchester Local Interaction Platform for Sustainability. Organised by the African Centre for Cities at the University of Cape Town, the meeting brought together partners in Sweden, Kenya, UK and South Africa who are all working towards greater collaboration for sustainable cities as part of the Mistra Urban Futures centre. Unlike the usual conference, where you are locked in airless rooms for days on end, our hosts had thought to locate the meetings in different places around the Cape – including the spectacular Kirstenbosch Gardens and a visit to Phillipi, one of the largest townships in Cape Town.

Phillipi was a sobering place – a township of up to 500,000 people, many living in poverty, in cramped and crowded conditions, where deaths from unstable electricity supplies and summer fires rampaging through the densely packed dwellings are unimaginably high. A far cry from the kinds of poverty that we see in the U.K. Nonetheless – as became apparent during the panel debate I participated in “Fair Cities for International Poverty Reduction” – the generic issue of who holds the ‘right to the city’ cuts across both very different contexts. During my talk, I was able to draw on our Greater Manchester work. I highlighted how little deprived communities are engaged with formal governance structures and how poverty is only selectively prioritised within different policy frameworks. The failure of service-sector led economic growth in the 1990s and the parallel creative boom in addressing these issues is a key starting point for our project.

Fresh from Cape Town and the scorching heat (experienced only fleetingly in-between some serious work), a few days later I forced my way across the Pennines in the snow to Leeds. There, I attended a seminar held by the Sustainable Practices Research Group on the Uses and Abuses of Community for Sustainable Development. Not directly about the creative urban economy. Nor specifically about cities. But what was interesting was how the common issues surrounding the lack of connectivity – between formal and informal governing and how communities are conceptualised as targets rather than participants in policy formulation and implementation – cut across policy areas.

Onwards then the next week to Birmingham for the Project Continuity Day. Phil has already blogged about the day as a whole and what’s going on in the different workpackages. We did have a particularly fruitful discussion about different governance questions with a few themes reoccurring:
• The relative importance and value of formal structures and policy frameworks and informal or ‘organic’ forms of organisation
• The extent to which creative industries/culture are given priority in the new Local Enterprise Partnerships (LEPs), the relative power of the LEPs and the impact of the abolition of the Regional Development Agencies
• The confidence of the two cities in articulating their distinctiveness – and the impact that rhetoric has on practice and vice versa
• The different ways in which the city-regional agenda are impacting on questions of territoriality – and questions of political stability
• The role of infrastructure and ‘nodes’ for creative industries to come together to collaborate or otherwise share ideas and how non-formal and non-traditional spaces may provide alternatives
• The extent to which creative urban policies and regeneration policies are merged and blurred – and whether and how this is problematic, for whom?
• The differences in the stories we tell about the development of the creative urban economy in each city – and whose interests those stories serve?

A very brief overview of a short, but packed set of discussions which we will take back into our respective cities to continue to inform the research.

And so to London to meet with Yvette Vaughan-Jones, Visiting Arts, one of our main partners on the project. Yvette has been with the team since the start – attending the sandpit back in December 2011 and we were delighted to have her batting on our side in the highly competitive process that followed. As one of the co-commissions in workpackage 5, Visiting Arts will be developing a project, drawing on their tried and tested Square Mile framework. 1mile² has inspired communities to explore the cultural and ecological diversity of their neighbourhoods through artistic engagement. Artists and ecologists collaborate and lead activity that enables vital dialogue and knowledge sharing within and between cultural and geographic communities. Launched in 2009, the programme has so far involved 42 artists, 18 ecologists, 14 creative organizations and reached over 13 500 people in 10 countries.

To take this forward into the Cultural Intermediation project we have decided to work with Visiting Arts on a pre-commissioning study to look at best practice for artist residencies and socially engaged artistic practice. Combined with a proposed seminar in the CIRCUS and some preliminary work in Greater Manchester, the partnership promises an exciting test-bed to cut across the work packages on governance, community, evaluation and co-commissioning. More information to follow…

News from the North

2013 is beckoning so it’s a good time for an update from the Greater Manchester team about developments on the project. It’s particularly exciting that we now have Dr Karen Smith in post in SURF, who has joined us from the Arts Council and brings a wealth of experience and knowledge to the project. Karen started at the end of November and has hit the ground running, bringing a fantastic practice-based perspective on cultural intermediaries to the team. Karen will be blogging shortly about her first few weeks in post – and will be providing more regular updates from the GM team.

Karen will be able to build on a number of scoping activities carried out over the last six months. Locally, we’ve been talking with Creative Industries in Salford, the Hive in Broughton, Seedley and Langworthy Trust and Ordsall Community Arts and identified interesting initiatives, organisations and projects across the city-region, including Redeye Photography, the Secret Garden Festival, the Small Cinema at Moston and collaborative work between Manchester International Festival and the Biospheric Foundation.

Manchester City Council’s Culture Bash on 22nd November provided a good opportunity to revisit the city’s Cultural Ambition and see how the local authority’s role is changing in the contemporary climate. The Culture Bash (thoughtfully organised around the theme of sweets with plenty on offer!) provided a platform for different arts and cultural organisations to share experiences, make connections and discuss critical challenges. I attended sessions on governance and arts and sustainability, both fascinating and helpful to set the scene for the project. Presentations were made by Castlefield Gallery and Agency, Manchester Community Central, Julie’s Bicycle, the Carbon Literacy programme, Manchester Art Gallery and the Royal Exchange Theatre which illuminated how organisations are re-focussing their roles and responsibilities in light of the contemporary challenges.

Developments across the sector were foremost in people’s minds, particularly with the news that week of the proposed cuts to the arts, museums and libraries in Newcastle City Council . However, the event was characterised by a sense that Manchester was in as best a place as possible to weather the storm.

We’ve had initial conversations with freelancing cultural intermediaries who work across sectors and communities, including Laura Drane, Sheni-Ravi Smith, Kerenza McClarnan and Sally Fort. And we’ve also started scoping out changes at the national level – through meetings with Steve Broome at the Royal Society for the Arts and Phil Cave at the Arts Council.

Tim and I have also had project meetings with Paul Long, Dave O’Brien and Ian Grosvenor and Natasha McNab in July to begin to look at overlaps and synergies between the different work packages and identify some common themes. Cultural memory and learning were particularly salient, particularly in relation to work package 4, where we discussed the importance of finding ways to identify traces of cultural intermediation within communities. The idea of the ‘Big Story’ interviews was also born here, to bridge between the contemporary and historical work.

In November I had the opportunity to go to Lille, France to as part of a Visiting Professor scheme. Whilst there, I met up with Pierre Yana and his Masters students who are going to be working on an international review paper for the project. Many of the students have been directly involved at some point in cultural economy initiatives, including Lille 2004 Capital of Culture, so have some insider knowledge to share. I also got the chance to sample Lille Fantastique – a city-wide cultural event designed to re-animate the city following the Capital of Culture process to show that ‘le voyage continue’.

In final news, we are delighted to welcome Laura Ager as our PhD student on Universities as Cultural Intermediaries, who is starting after Christmas. We will encourage her to join in the blogging fun to let you know what she is up to.

Have a good break and see you in 2013.