citizens making something happen

It takes courage to step up and organise something to make life in your neighbourhood or city better. Even when it’s part of your job it takes courage: What if no-one turns up? What if it rains? What if people don’t like what we’re doing? What if doing this makes us look stupid? What if we fail? These (and many other) questions plague us (and every artist) every time we/they do something. When you have raised funding to make your event happen, the pressure is even more intense – this is public money and there’s a big responsibility to make sure it is spent well.

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Time to find out if the future works

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.

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What would happen if we used Citizens’ Assemblies to crowdsource arts policy?

Communities would be engaged and empowered and arts policies would be invigorated, says Janet Vaughan, co-artistic director of Coventry-based artists company Talking Birds, whose work focuses on the relationship between people and place.

Attempting to banish the consultation fatigue of four years’ involvement in the preparation for Coventry’s time as UK City of Culture in 2021, and desperate to understand what value ‘ordinary people’ placed on arts and culture, Talking Birds called a Citizens’ Assembly in the city on arts, culture and creativity.

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How will arts, culture and creativity shape a better future for Coventry?

A blog about Art for the People, a Talking Birds project, originally written for Coventry 2021.

We’re hugely excited to be developing Art for the People with the support of Coventry 2021. This is a project that has been a very long time in the gestation – and for a while we didn’t know whether we would be able to convince people to invest and make it happen – because it doesn’t really take the shape of a traditional art project.

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