A Cultural Strategy sounds boring. And sometimes it is boring. But a good Cultural Strategy can tell a compelling story of a place – of its values and ambitions. Of its hopes and dreams. Of its direction of travel.
Some people think that our city has stalled. But we don’t think that’s true – and so we’ve invited artists and decision-makers to gather and re-set: let’s collectively re-imagine our story and work out how we want to tell it.
It’s been a tricky few years for the arts and cultural sectors across the country, and our situation here in Coventry has been differently – but no less – tricky. Having lost the planned legacy part of the City of Culture programme means that the last 12 months have looked very different to those envisaged in the last refresh of the Cultural Strategy: so it is definitely time for another one…
We can probably all agree that there’s little point in a Cultural Strategy that sits on a shelf gathering dust. But how do you go about making (or, in this case, refreshing) your Cultural Strategy in a different way? How do you make it a living document? Something that everyone has a stake in? Something that can evolve as the place does? Something that everyone feels ownership of – and responsibility for?
This is why The Future Works event is happening in Coventry on Thursday, to try and shape this refresh in such a way that it can be held in the hearts and minds, words and actions of people across the city.
But given that it is never possible to gather absolutely everyone together in one place, how can we make something that everyone can feel ownership of?
We’ve thought about this a lot. As anyone who works within communities will tell you, all we can do is make sure that we continue to operate with honesty and open-ness, sharing progress and ideas often, making spaces for people to input into the process in a way that works for them. We have to build trust, and include people as equals in the conversation, at whatever point they feel able to join it – and this takes time.
This is why The Future Works event has been so long in the making.
The Council, the Culture Compact, or one of the larger cultural institutions could have called the sector together to facilitate this cultural strategy refresh, and they probably could have made that happen much sooner. But, to their credit, the Council and Universities recognised that – at this time – Coventry needs to go about it a bit differently. We need something slower, kinder, more collectively owned – and so, a rolling group of creative practitioners has worked collectively to shape this event over a few months, commissioned by Culture Works so that no-one has been asked to work for free.
If we want the Cultural Strategy to be truly owned by the city’s artists, then artists, creative practitioners and cultural sector leaders need to be at the heart of it. We need to inhabit and shape the Culture Works partnership whilst we shape and own the strategy (and the way it is delivered, though we need a much better word than ‘delivered’), because we can’t know what shape it really needs to be until we know what it needs to do.
At The Future Works event, artists and decision-makers will collectively explore a future vision of Coventry, trying it on for size. We’ll spend some time looking back at ourselves as we are now from that future; we’ll look at what sort of things we might need to do in order to get to that future; and we’ll work out what we can do now, in order to get started.
We’ll use the ideas we come up with on Thursday with as the basis of refreshing the current Cultural Strategy document (and laying some foundations for the next one), but also as a way of finding-out-through-doing how we might work together now (what shape the Culture Works partnership might need to be) and how – working collectively – we can nurture and grow our city and its extraordinary people, full of vision and hope, passion and creativity.
People who want to make things better.
Together.
** With love and gratitude to all the artists and freelancers who have contributed to the rolling relay race planning of this event (you know who you are!). To those who have contributed thoughts and comments along the way, and to those who are yet to join the conversation: this is for you. **
Notes:
There are various action plans, strategies and frameworks in play in the City that, if you compare them, actually have very similar priorities, aims and goals. We did a mapping exercise to compare the following:
Cultural Strategy document 2017-2027 (2022 Refresh)
Recommendations of Art for the People, Talking Birds’ Citizens’ Assembly 2022
F13 network’s Creating the Conditions for Creation 2023
Coventry City Council’s One Coventry Plan 2022-30
Coventry Arts Forum’s Theory of Change model 2020-2030 (not currently online)
Learning points from City of Culture evaluation 2023
Given the synergy of the aims across these, and with a bit of luck, we have a good chance to bring something really useful together on Thursday. Watch this space…
UPDATE 23.1.24 In the interests of sharing as much as we can, as quickly as possible, the materials prepared for The Future Works event (shape of the day, discussion prompts etc) – are now available online here.
Words from the Birds 