The Culture Works Collective

At the close of this event, the slightly radical proposition that Coventry’s Cultural Strategy should henceforth be collectively devised, owned and delivered was adopted.

As far as we know, no other city is already doing this, and so there is no blueprint to follow. We’ve put together a structure for how we think this will work (see below) – but we know that it is a process, and the change will take time. We are trying to make a culture shift – from the way things have always been done to something that hasn’t been done before – so we’ll almost certainly be calling on you all for a bit of help and support at some point…

The Culture Works Collective

Coventry Culture Works Collective (CCWC) is the core representative group whose job is to oversee the creation and delivery of Coventry’s Cultural Strategy.

It is also the Cultural Compact for Coventry. A Cultural Compact is a network which brings together people and organisations from different sectors and backgrounds to ensure culture and creativity can play a key role in the future development of a city. Many towns and cities have them, but each is different, tailored to the locality by the people involved.

The members of CCWC are known as Reps, and they represent (and are answerable to) different groups and networks across our city, from residents to creative freelancers, small and big organisations to community groups.

The Reps purpose is to oversee how Coventry’s Cultural Strategy is devised and delivered – collectively. A city’s cultural strategy needs to consider (and put in place actions to ensure) the ways that cultural and creative activity is made available to all its residents and woven through all aspects of a city’s life, because experiencing and taking part in arts, culture and creativity not only brings us joy, but is the thing that bonds us together as humans.

Before CCWC in Coventry (and in most towns and cities), the Cultural Strategy would have been written by the City Council, or the City Council in partnership with ‘anchor institutions’ such as Universities. They also then have the responsibility for delivering the Strategy, although often the Strategy would be a document that sat on a shelf gathering dust.

Why Collective?

The feeling at The Future Works in 2024 was that (of course) all artists and organisations already have principles, priorities and strategies that drive the work they do and help guide them in devising and delivering projects – and, actually, many of those principles and priorities are very similar to the things that get put in the Cultural Strategy (because we all live in the same city and we can see what needs to happen).

Because it’s a big city and we are all busy, we don’t always know what everyone else is doing and – inevitably – there are overlaps, repetitions and gaps. We wondered what we might be able to achieve for the people that live and work in this city if we got rid of the distinction between ‘Them’ (Council, Universities) and ‘Us’ (artists, arts and cultural organisations, community groups) and – instead – all worked together as equal partners, collectively?

In 2021, Coventry arts organisation Talking Birds called the UK’s first Citizens’ Assembly on Arts, Culture and Creativity. This was the first time that a representative group of city residents had been asked to consider how arts, culture and creativity could shape a better future for Coventry – and their recommendations have been highly influencial, even if not all of them have yet been realised.

In many ways, the formation of the Culture Works Collective is a legacy of this ground-breaking Citizens’ Assembly. It brings together Reps from all over the city and, as you’ll see from this early sketch of the structure (below), it aims to open clear channels of communication and accountability across the city, to ensure the city’s Cultural Strategy not only works for all of us, but is made and delivered by all of us – we all have responsibility for drawing on arts, culture and creativity to help shape a better future for Coventry, and for all of us that live and work here.

* TFW1 was created by representatives of the small organisations and freelance creative workforce that make up the F13 ‘network’. It was commissioned by Coventry City Council and the city’s two Universities (the traditional custodians of the city’s Cultural Strategy) as a way to bring the wider city back together to mend and rebuild trust after the loss of the City of Culture Trust and its Legacy Programme. Read more about it’s origins here.