About

A Cultural Strategy sounds boring. And sometimes it is boring. But a good Cultural Strategy can tell a compelling story of a place – of its values and ambitions. Of its hopes and dreams. Of its direction of travel.

Some people think that our city has stalled. But we don’t think that’s true – and so we’ve invited artists and decision-makers to gather and re-set: let’s collectively re-imagine our story and work out how we want to tell it.

It’s been a tricky few years for the arts and cultural sectors across the country, and our situation here in Coventry has been differently – but no less – tricky. Having lost the planned legacy part of the City of Culture programme has meant that the last 12 months have looked very different to those envisaged in the last refresh of the Cultural Strategy: so it is definitely time for another one…

We can probably all agree that there’s little point in a Cultural Strategy that sits on a shelf gathering dust. But how do you go about making (or, in this case, refreshing) your Cultural Strategy in a different way? How do you make sure it is a living document? Something that everyone has a stake in? Something that can evolve as the place does? Something that everyone feels ownership of – and responsibility for?

This is why The Future Works event happened, to try and shape this refresh in such a way that it can be held in the hearts and minds, words and actions of people across the city.

But given it is never possible to gather absolutely everyone together in one place, how can we make something that everyone can feel ownership of?

We’ve thought about this a lot. As anyone who works within communities will tell you, all we can do is make sure that we continue to operate with honesty and open-ness, sharing progress and ideas often, making spaces for people to input into the process in a way that works for them. We have to build trust, and include people as equals in the conversation, and this takes time.

This is why The Future Works event has been so long in the making.

The Council, the Culture Compact, or one of the larger cultural institutions could have called the sector together to facilitate this cultural strategy refresh, and they probably could have made that happen much sooner. But, to their credit, the Council and Universities recognised that – at this time – Coventry needs to go about it a bit differently. We need something slower, more collectively owned. And so, a rolling group of creative practitioners worked collectively to shape the event over a few months, commissioned by Culture Works so that no-one has been asked to work for free.

At The Future Works event, artists and decision-makers collectively explored a future vision of Coventry, trying it on for size. We spent some time looking back at ourselves as we are now from that future; we looked at what sort of things we might need to do in order to get to that future; and we tried to work out what we can do now, in order to get started.

We’ll use the ideas we came up with at The Future Works event as the basis of refreshing the current Cultural Strategy document (and laying some foundations for the next one), but also as a way of finding-out-through-doing how we might work together now, and how – working collectively – we can nurture and grow our city and its extraordinary people, full of vision and hope, passion and creativity.

People who want to make things better.

Together.

For more background on how we got to this point, the story is documented in blog posts which you can find here.