The Culture Works Collective

The purpose of the event was to both introduce the Culture Works Collective and the city’s refreshed Cultural Strategy which runs to the end of 2027.

The conference opened with a warm and thought-provoking keynote from François Matarasso (link here to a similar address) about the power of culture as a human right, and the place of co-creation within this. He also chaired a panel on co-creation practice in Coventry later in the day.

Updates on various matters of interest to the cultural sector – included:

• new CCC culture funding available soon; Made in Cov grants of £2-5k grants available to organisations and individuals), and small capital grants of £20-50k
  https://www.coventry.gov.uk/arts-1/opportunities
• Connected Coventry: A Tech Reuse Arts Fund from Virgin Media O2 is an £18k funded opportunity open to creatives, makers and artists of Coventry. The call is to design an installation telling the story and ambition of #CovConnects: building a digitally included city through sharing and reusing old technology. Find the brief and details here: CLOSING DATE 26th MARCH
• the British Art Show, a touring visual arts show curated by Ekow Eshun which opens in Coventry in September. Alongside the touring works, a lot of Coventry-specific fringe activity has been planned by the Coventry Visual Arts Forum (Herbert, Mead, Biennial, Artspace, Art Riot Collective, Cov Uni, SOMA and various freelance visual artists) to take place while the show is here. There will be opportunities attached to this tbc.
• the UNESCO data project, which is looking to gather evidence as to why and how culture is an important contributor to positive growth, cohesion etc as measured through the Global Sustainability Goals framework, but is under-represented in policy. Coventry is the only UK city involved, and was selected on the basis of its strong historical collection of cultural data (since 1989). UNESCO’s goal is to produce visible, measurable data which shows the impact of culture and leads to better-informed policy and decision-making.
• CCC Green for All project has recently been awarded £990k with the headline aim of eradicating green deprivation in Coventry. It aims to use citywide mapping, citizen science and training in land and conservation skills to: assess the scale, spread and state of the city’s existing green and blue assets (producing an interactive layered map) and use this to inform policy across the entire council; understand (and increase) residents’ access to, and engagement with, nature and green spaces; identify where interventions/changes need to be made to improve spaces (for nature and humans) and act as a catalyst to attract funding and commitment to enable this.
• Update on City Centre Cultural Gateway (former IKEA building).

The afternoon keynote was by Prof Paul Moore, of Future Screens Northern Ireland, about how the city/region united around a creative story – that the cultural industries will replace heavy industries in Northern Ireland – to bring in millions of pounds for creative activity. His message was that you have to unite and think big to win the larger prize: they brought in £110m which built the largest VR set up in the world, put in place a comprehensive programme teaching young people game creation, and a mechanism for contractually employing local/regional artists and so on.

The Culture Works Collective had a stand collecting thoughts from attendees under the questions:

What’s the single most useful or important intervention arts & culture could make for our city?

What’s the single most useful or important intervention arts & culture could make where you live?

What’s the single most useful or important intervention arts & culture could make where you work?