Reflecting Value is a new podcast from the Centre for Cultural Value, where we will explore the big questions relating to cultural value in a reflective space.

Our first mini-series will focus on the area of culture, health and wellbeing. The three big questions we will explore are:

• How do we bring the two worlds of culture and health together?
• What is the specific role of arts, culture, heritage and screen in addressing health and wellbeing needs?
• Is research and practice in the field of culture, health and wellbeing diverse and inclusive/How diverse and inclusive is research and practice in the field of culture, health
  and wellbeing?

We are particularly looking for contributors who are:

• Health and social care professionals/commissioners with an interest in incorporating arts, culture, heritage and screen for patient health and wellbeing needs
• Cultural organisations/practitioners who have developed successful and sustained partnership with health and social care organisations/educators
• Cultural organisations/practitioners co-creating health and wellbeing programmes with diverse population groups
• Cultural organisations/practitioners who have developed programmes that address a specific health and or wellbeing need
• Heritage and screen organisations/practitioners who have developed programmes for health and wellbeing needs
• Researchers who have conducted longitudinal research to understand longer-term impacts of culture for health and wellbeing

If you’re interested, click the link here to send us a 1 minute audio or video recording (or a 300 word summary if you prefer) of why you would like to be involved in the podcast. I

Submit your responses on this form by 12 October at 3pm.

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This article by Ben Walmsley and Franco Bianchini was first published in Arts Professional on 3 September.

The diverse range of global policy responses aimed at protecting the cultural sector from the immediate impacts of Covid-19 have highlighted once again how differently arts and culture are regarded and invested in around the world. The spectrum ranges from the rapid, generous interventions of Germany at one end to the laissez-faire USA response at the other. As often, the UK falls somewhere in the middle: arguably late and poorly targeted, but ultimately significant, at least in financial terms.

These national interventions were aided or hindered by existing policy structures. For example, Germany’s dedicated artist social security scheme offered extensive support for cultural workers by automatically enrolling artists working in short-term and/or low-earning employment and fixing contributions for new career entrants.

Impact and opportunity
Some of the pandemic’s immediate as well as longer-term impacts on the UK’s cultural sector are already leaving their mark. For example, we have observed the sector’s dependence on emergency funds to avoid collapse, a particularly profound impact on freelance artists and mid-scale cultural organisations, and the growing risk of exclusion for people facing educational, cultural and economic poverty.

These impacts are likely to shrink the sector’s size (and therefore its significant cultural, social and economic contributions) and are almost certain to exacerbate the existing inequalities in cultural production and engagement. These effects could have been mitigated in the UK if we had a more nuanced social security system or even some sort of universal income for artists, and if the arts and culture had already been less exclusionary.

However, like most crises, this pandemic has opened-up significant opportunities for change. The potential for the rapid development of creative technologies is beginning to be realised as organisations have migrated online. A classic example is the National Theatre, which adjusted its philosophy of creating theatre for collective enjoyment by streaming for the first time into people’s homes, whilst augmenting its Immersive Storytelling Studio with virtual reality. During the lockdown we also witnessed a huge surge in everyday creativity and appreciated how arts and culture could bring households together and lift spirits.

We saw the emergence of new business models as some cultural organisations across the UK opened-up their venues as community centres and reconnected with their neighbourhoods in ever more creative ways. Mold’s Theatr Clwyd, for example, employed more than 20 freelance artists to develop work with young people while delivering food to the local community. We also observed the continued growth of the culture, health and wellbeing agenda, which represents a dangerous instrumentality to some and mainstream recognition of the positive social impacts of arts and culture to others. Many cultural workers and researchers are hoping that some of these changes will endure and that the sector won’t just spring back to its status quo.

A new agenda
An international research perspective can help sketch out a new agenda for cultural policy and practice. We are likely to see a stronger focus on cultural interventions, including community arts and library projects, which can help reduce social exclusion and digital divides, and contribute to re-skilling, as part of the response to rising unemployment. Likewise, projects that can help deal with the psychological and social traumas produced by the pandemic are likely to attract funding. Co-creative and participatory arts activities are classic examples.

Another global issue impacting on a new cultural agenda is the greater recognition of the impact of the pandemic on marginalised groups, underscored by the Black Lives Matter movements. We should therefore expect to see a growth in inclusive, multicultural and intercultural projects and further diversification of funding streams. This shift might well incorporate a more holistic, democratic and ‘curative’ approach to urban regeneration, which will try to square the circle between continuing to create jobs and wealth, while at the same time improving air quality and helping deal with the issues of loneliness, anxiety and depression.

The demise of the big city?
Some contributions to the debate suggest that as a result of the pandemic we could see a migration to smaller towns and cities, and, therefore, a renaissance of cultural projects in these places. Large cities might increasingly come under attack by various political forces across the globe for being harmful, unhealthy, unpatriotic, too permissive and chaotic. In response we are likely to see the emergence of new forms of co-operation between cities and their rural hinterlands. The ‘smart city’ agenda will probably acquire even greater prominence, bringing with it new issues of democratic control and governance.

On a more operational level we are sure to see a remodelling of cultural venues and spaces and, of course, an explosion of outdoor arts and culture as part of a rethinking of planning regulations to offer more public space to retail, cultural, eating, drinking and other social activities. The arts-sport collaboration agenda might well benefit from this evolution too. Indeed we are already seeing investment in inner-city parks and the further broadening and blurring of cultural parameters in the programmes emerging from Coventry 2021 and Leeds 2023. This is likely to play out in a sharper evaluation focus on social impacts, including once again culture, health and wellbeing, and a possible de-prioritisation of traditionally defined economic impacts.

For good and ill, the impacts of the Covid-19 pandemic are here to stay. As we face this historic crisis, it is more important than ever that we maintain an international perspective and collaborate with our global partners to secure a positive future for the arts, culture and heritage.

Ben Walmsley is Professor of Cultural Engagement at the University of Leeds and Director of the Centre for Cultural Value. Franco Bianchini is an Associate Director of the Centre for Cultural Value.

Image: Who Are Ya? Tate Exchange, Dan Weil Photography

The post How global issues are driving a new cultural agenda appeared first on Centre for Cultural Value.

This article was first published in Arts Professional on 1 April.

It’s notoriously difficult to articulate cultural value but in these challenging times, the imperative to do so seems more urgent than ever. Although we know that everyone values culture in some way, shape or form, there’s no consensus about how to capture and measure that value. We know that many academics, funders and policymakers are suspicious of the advocacy focus of much of the sector’s evaluation and we know, in turn, that many arts and cultural practitioners feel frustrated that the painstaking evaluation reports they do produce often end up gathering dust on a funder’s shelf or festering in their inbox. They might also feel that they lack the necessary time and skills to produce the kind of evaluation that they’d ideally like to.

No more wheel reinvention
We’d go so far as to say that there’s an evaluation crisis in the sector. This was confirmed by the scoping and listening events that we hosted across the UK in the spring. There is a hunger for training and peer learning in all aspects of evaluation and for the findings of existing evaluations to be digested and shared. Because without this, we keep on reinventing the wheel, and failing to learn from what goes wrong, as well as what goes right. Indeed emerging research from two of our Associate Directors is highlighting the extent to which ‘failure’ is often buried in cultural practice and evaluation.

The remit of the new Centre for Cultural Value is to further understanding of the impacts that arts, culture and heritage have on people, and, more broadly, on society. The Centre aims to promote an evidence-based approach to cultural policy and planning, and to enhance impact narration and evaluation.

The challenge ahead
In getting to grips with this ambitious remit, one of the first things we have to acknowledge is that meaningful primary research is challenging. It can be resource-intensive and requires specialist skills. As such, it puts an extra strain on those whose primary concern is making creative work and/or delivering social impact. So one of the most powerful things we can do is to help the sector mine the rich seam of evidence that already exists, hidden from sight within academic publications, in forgotten archives and on ageing hard-drives. We have an important role to play in signposting and synthesising the best evidence out there. We can stop hard-pressed cultural practitioners straining to prove what has already been proven – or otherwise – and instead help them build on what is already known. We can nurture a culture of evidence-sharing which currently struggles to thrive in an anti-failure environment.

Most powerful of all, we can help to address the “so what?”. In order to get a real sense of social and public value we need to work as a collective, combining our stories, evidence, findings and experience to make what we know to be a compelling case. We are planning to develop new resources and meta-analyses to enable shared learning, easy navigation and collective storytelling.

Who needs evaluation?
We can also ask the question: Who is evaluation actually for? There is a strong tendency to consider evaluation as a necessary evil demanded by funders. But what we’ve heard over the course of our scoping events is a strong desire from practitioners to develop a culture of reflective and collaborative practice. We’ve also heard that we need to cohere and collaborate more on evaluation, supporting organisations to adapt and adopt approaches from within and beyond the cultural sector.

So we are planning to convene a working group of evaluation experts who will co-create a new set of evaluation principles. We’re all too aware that there will never be (and shouldn’t be) a one-size-fits-all approach to cultural evaluation, so what we won’t be doing is developing a reductive evaluation tool or even toolkit. But we will identify and showcase good practice in research and evaluation, and work closely with key funders and policymakers to get cross-sector buy-in to an agreed set of rigorous principles. Alongside a new series of How To Guides, we hope that this will help cultural practitioners and organisations to plan, commission and/or conduct robust evaluation that has a positive and compelling impact on their funders and provides fresh insights into cultural value.

Our aspiration is to create a movement of cultural value. We are a small Centre dedicated to enhancing understanding of the value and impact of arts and culture and we can only make real inroads into this if we work collaboratively, always. So please join us in our endeavour to make a difference and make research and evaluation more meaningful.

Ben Walmsley is Director of the Centre for Cultural Value and Professor of Cultural Engagement and Director of Research and Innovation in the School of Performance and Cultural Industries at the University of Leeds. Anne Torreggiani is Co-Director of the Centre for Cultural Value and Chief Executive of The Audience Agency.

Image: Fun Palaces, Brockwell Lido. Photo: Helen Murray

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