Collaborate project spotlight
Find out more about the partnership between Rising Arts Agency and Andreana Drencheva, King’s College London
Equitable partnerships
Research partnership:
Rising Arts Agency with Andreana Drencheva, Senior Lecturer in Entrepreneurship, King’s College London
Research focus:
Equitable partnerships – power sharing in the cultural sector
This partnership was awarded a research grant in June 2022 as part of the first round of the Centre for Cultural Value’s Collaborate programme.
The fund supported innovative new partnerships between cultural sector practitioners and academics to explore under-explored questions around cultural value.
What did the project explore?
Cultural value is often created through collaboration, yet the specific dynamics of these collaborations are under-explored.
Rising Arts Agency is a Bristol-based community of young creatives aged 16–30 mobilising others for radical social, political and cultural change. Working with Andreana Drencheva from King’s College London, the partnership explored the nature of truly equitable partnerships in the cultural sector, particularly how power imbalances manifest for grassroots organisations and marginalised creatives working with cultural sector institutions.
The project aimed to shift the focus from how marginalised creatives and grassroots organisations can navigate these power imbalances – where the burden is on them – to how these imbalances can be removed to increase cultural value for creatives, cultural organisations and audiences.
This research used Rising Arts Agency as a microcosm: part of a grassroots ecosystem, where marginalised creatives come for support and cultural partnerships are being continually modelled. Using reflection, interviews, diaries, labs, sharing events and archives these personal experiences were placed in the context of the wider sector with benefits for institutions, similar grassroots organisations, marginalised creatives and funders.
Listen to Power in Partnerships, a podcast from Rising Arts that was both part of the research process and the sharing of findings.
Read the Power in Partnerships zine, sharing themes and insights from the research.
Project learning and findings
