Curious Minds

Your Bridge – a consultation with the North West

Curious Minds are currently engaging in a large scale consultation with arts and cultural organisations, institutions, schools, museum and renaissance sectors, music hubs, local authority representatives and children and young people.

This consultation is to help Curious Minds gain a real knowledge and intelligence about what the current landscape for arts and cultural work with children and young people looks like. As well as attempting to build up a confident diagnosis of how that may change over the next 12 months, ensuring the Bridge Organisation programme we deliver for 2012/13 is rooted in stakeholder need and is reflective of the distinctive context and potential of the North West region at this moment in time.

Since January and up till the end of March we will be consulting you in many different ways:

• 1:1 Interviews
• Telephone Interviews
• Surveys
• Focus Groups
• And Seminars

We will be contacting a wide selection of you over the next few weeks to take part in particular types of consultations and everyone is invited to our seminars and official launch in April.

While Curious Minds is the Bridge organisation for the whole of the North West  - from Cumbria to Cheshire – we can’t make judgements or decisions on what needs to happen in the region without your input. Nor would we want to. This is your opportunity to get involved and share your views and opinions on the state of the region, what barriers exist preventing great work and art with children and young people happening and what needs to happen to make the North West the leading region for arts and cultural work with children and young people in the United Kingdom, if not the world.

We want people to talk about the North West as the place to be for work with children and young people and to help us make that a reality we need your help and input.

Although seminars and launch are positioned in particular locations in the North West  they will not be thematically about that region.

We will be sending out official invites and more information next week but for now please place the dates in your diaries.

Let’s make 2012 and every year onwards a great year for the North West. Let the conversation and debate begin.

For more information on our consultation please email glen.meskell@curiousminds.org.uk