Perhaps it’s time to stop talking about a ‘cultural offer’. This week I took part a fascinating discussion between Liverpool City Region Find Your Talent partners and Damian Allen, Executive Director for Children and Family Services in Knowsley. It’s always encouraging to spend time with people like Damian who are committed advocates for the power of culture in children and young people’s lives and it was clear that Knowsley will be doing whatever they can to ensure that the opportunities that have been developed through Find Your Talent are maintained, despite the funding cuts. The most interesting part of the conversation focussed on the changes that the cultural sector needs to make in order to embed creative and cultural activity at the heart of communities in a way that makes culture real and relevant in those settings. Damian set out a timely challenge to the cultural sector, based around the need to move from an ‘offer’ to a ‘model’ and I think he’s absolutely right about this.
Cultural organisations certainly work hard to extend their offer through both outreach programmes and innovative approaches to attracting new audiences, but I’ve believed for a while now that it doesn’t matter how wonderful your outreach programme is when you are working in settings where perceptions of culture as being ‘not for us’ are deeply entrenched. The development of cultural capital requires the establishment of new delivery and development models that begin with recognising and valuing the existing cultural assets of a community and building upon them, rather than the operation of established paternalistic and deficit based models that still prevail. So the ‘offer’ needs to be replaced by a ‘model’ of cultural development which is deeply rooted in the everyday experience of people and is relevant and meaningful to that context. As participation in locality-based and locality-relevant cultural activity grows, connections with cultural activity beyond the immediate locality and beyond existing fields of experience will inevitably be made through the intrinsic drivers of curiosity and ambition. As participation grows, it should be the responsibility of cultural development workers to broaden the community’s awareness of the possibilities available to them and to facilitate connections.
This has massive implications for the ways in which cultural organisations, particularly the larger ones, position and structure their activities. It is assumed that there is permanent value in the maintenance of large scale, high profile cultural institutions that are rich in artefacts and histories and we would of course be foolish to neglect the strength and richness of these treasures. But now, more than any other time in the recent history of cultural development, is the time to radically reorganise how we develop cultural capital and cultural participation with models that are affordable and relevant and start by valuing the community’s existing cultural assets.
I believe that schools have a vital role in this and should see themselves as centres for cultural development – connecting outwards to the communities around them and developing capabilities for resilient and sustainable living through cultural capacity building. This has obvious links to ideas emerging from the new government’s Big Society thinking – I wonder what role culture will play in that.
Curious Minds is currently developing tools that schools can use to examine their role as cultural hubs. If you are interested in this area of work, do get in touch.
Chris May