Collectively Strategising Culture Summit 2024 – What happened and what’s next?

In February 2024, Culture Central bought together over 125 people representing the leadership of our regional cultural ecology to ask each other ‘What are 'our' components of a collective, actionable, cultural strategy for the West Midlands?’ 

The thinking behind our focus for the summit can be found in this blog by our Deputy CEO Dr. Anthony Ruck here.

In this reflective video, you can catch a glimpse of the consensus-building activity which we engaged in and hear some of the takeaways participants had on the day.

The summit was our time, as a sector to be proactive and consider what we needed for us, our audiences our organisations, workforce and places in the spirit of the West Midlands Culture Response Unit. We wanted to create a non-hierarchical space and make sure every voice was heard.  We wanted to create a purposeful, active and safe space for discussion, utilising consensus building to shape an approach that delivered on our vision for the summit.  

Throughout the morning, our speakers presented a series of provocations. We heard about the challenges the sector has faced over the years, the need for investment and the impact on the resilience of leaders and organisations. We were challenged to think about radical change, not just incremental change and how to make our own weather in the current climate. We were inspired to continue to be ambitious and celebrate our regions successes. 

The afternoon was spent in lively table discussions. Our facilitators (some of who were members of our collective programme)  were tasked with supporting the table to discuss ' What are 'our' components of a collective, actionable, cultural strategy for the West Midlands?’ and then collectively agree their shared priorities, eventually agreeing to just 3 answers to the question to be shared with the rest of the room.  As each table shared their three priorities, the room worked to listen, reflect and build consensus.  

Our final stage was to group the answers and collectively agree on themes, this proved challenging, energising and an important process to find our key components for a regional strategy for culture.  

You’ll see from the video, those there on the day found the approach and format active, collaborative, challenging and important.  

What came out of the day has shaped Culture Central plans and activity for the next twelve months, with some of the key components being supported by our direct activity. For others we will convene groups from our membership and a range of partners to work with the sector on to develop, but to give you a sense of progress so far, here are some of the outcomes from the day and our current plans to build an actionable strategy for us all:

Culture with, for and by everyone 

This grouping of key components underpins all of the work we are doing in the region and sets out our overarching collective vision for the strategy.  

Answers to the question included things such as ‘centre culture around all forms of creative engagement, ‘diversifying and demystifying engagement’, collaboration to build audiences and a people-first approach using codesign.  

In order to kick off this strand of activity, as part of our ACE Investment Principles Support Organisation work, we will be commissioning the West Midlands Cultural Sector Research project 2.0.  A fresh mapping of people and places of the region, and cultural engagement, building on new, up-to-date data. A priority for this will be to incorporate a way of capturing people’s everyday creative engagement.  

Charter for Equity  

This priority came through discussions on pay and stability in the workforce, but subsequent discussions about the summit highlighted that this needed to be broader and think about equitable practice across the workforce.  

So, you’ll see in today’s newsletter, that we are looking to commission someone to help us with the first phase of developing the charter.  You can read the brief here.  

Putting Creativity at the heart of education and life-long learning 

This was a clear priority for many of us in the room, and covered a number of specific areas, specifically lobbying for creative education reform and a collaborative approach to talent development.   

We have a strong history of delivering creative and cultural education in our region, with a number of high performing local cultural education partnerships and organisations and artists focussing on work with schools, children and young people.  

This was already a key advocacy priority for members, so we will work in partnership with Arts Connect, regional LCEPS and organisations, bringing together a group to support the strategy development for this important strand of work.

Further reflections

Other headings for the day included collective ambition, creating formal pathways, learning and understanding, powerful evidence, cross-sector development for sustainable growth, our West Midlands superpowers, cultivating cultural communities, West Midlands culture goes global and rethinking structures of mobility (Transport).  

My personal reflections on the day cemented my belief that the sector is driving to be truly collaborative, equitable and focused on supporting creativity and culture for all the people and places of our region.  

There is a lot of ambition in the outcomes for the day and significant opportunities to work together to achieve that ambition and we welcome you all to continue in these conversations as we continue to develop this strategy activity in partnership over the next 12 months.  Our next members meeting on 26th June will be focussed on developing an action plan which we will share more widely later in the year.  

Erica Love
CEO
Culture Central