I was invited by think-tank Culture Commons to write a guest blog for their work on "the future of local cultural decision making" - a "major four-nations research and open policy development programme to explore how devolution and increased local decision making might impact on the creative, cultural and heritage ecosystem in the UK". I used the opportunity to reflect on my personal and professional experiences of grassroots, community-rooted creative activity, and on the politics and potential for this kind of work. It turned into rather a long-read, the first part of which is below, or you can access the full piece over on the Culture Commons website.
Culture Commons Guest blog: From warm words to cold hard cash by Kathryn Welch
Image credit: Culture Collective activity, @strangerandfiction / @jazgradyartist
Back in 1998, as an opinionated and precocious twelve year-old in Bolsover, a former mining town in Derbyshire, I wrote to the Editor of our local newspaper, The Derbyshire Times. In an impassioned letter, I protested plans to demolish our (long closed) swimming pool and replace it with an Assembly Rooms. An earlier edition of the newspaper had suggested some of the sorts of exciting cultural events that residents could expect to grace the new Assembly Rooms, mentioning a programme of musical recitals, concerts and performances by renowned actors. Twelve-year old me was unimpressed by their suggestions, writing boldly in my letter to the Editor that “I hate brass bands, don’t like choirs and haven’t heard of Judi Dench”.
My parents were apparently startled to learn about my foray into political journalism when a neighbour leaned over the fence and dryly said “I see your Kathryn’s in the paper”, and the story’s only improved in light of my subsequent career coordinating and advocating for community arts initiatives. I’ve stumbled across that newspaper clipping periodically over the years, and whilst it never fails to make me cringe, it’s also come to serve as a useful reminder of what it is to try to ‘bring culture’ to a community. Even the most well-intentioned initiatives will run up against diverging opinions about what kind of cultural provision a place might want or need, including - but certainly not limited to, mouthy local pre-teens.
Fast-forward 25 or so years, and I’m immersed in the leadership of Culture Collective, Creative Scotland’s flagship participatory arts programme. The programme is intended to invest in a cultural landscape across Scotland that is designed and driven by the communities in which it is rooted. It feels like an opportunity to do better by today’s versions of that opinionated 12 year old, and their parents and grandparents, and to support a creative and cultural sector that is more genuinely shaped by the interests, passions, questions and talents of local communities.
With a network of 26 creative projects, and almost 500 artists and creative practitioners, we embarked on a gigantic experiment to explore what it takes to invest in a creative landscape that speaks from, to and of the diversity of Scotland’s people and places. It was a rare and precious investment of significant scale in community-led creative practice, committing £10m to collaborative, participatory arts projects across Scotland, alongside funding for a network of peer-support, development opportunities, learning and sharing.
It was an opportunity to test in practice what works when it comes to giving local communities a greater say in what happens in their place, enabled by a funding process designed to be flexible, to embrace uncertainty and change (especially in the context of the Covid-19 pandemic, from which Culture Collective funding emerged), and centring the needs of both artists and communities at its heart.
In light of these experiences, I’ve been invited to share some thoughts and learning to feed into Culture Common’s work on the future of local cultural decision making, with a particular focus on considering how more localised decision making might impact the UK's creative, cultural and heritage ecosystem.