Supporting new work

During the programme, each Creative Producer was supported with a development grant of £5,000 to put their ideas about city change into practice. Cities around the world share common characteristics but are also defined by their unique histories and cultures. The interpretation of city change, and the strategies developed to address it, were distinctly different according to the specificities of person and context. In some cases, the Creative Producer was able to identify a specific social issue, while other Creative Producers faced a more complex set of challenges within their city context.

Many of the cohort found they already had solid foundations to build upon, particularly those who worked within organisations and had access to their resources. For others, it was necessary to use the grant to begin to build a foundation, whether this was the development of professional skills or leading research into the specific needs of their city.  A lot of the Producers built communities of practice among local creative talent and involved citizens in a collaborative engagement process.

A lot of the Producers built communities of practice among local creative talent and involved citizens in a collaborative engagement process.

Because it was important that Creative Producers International provided the opportunity for our participants to activate their learning and develop their research around city change in a live context, they were invited to apply for a competitive investment fund of up to £10,000, designed to support the creation of new, artist-led work in public space which would leverage the individual and collective value of the network.

As part of the application, we asked Producers to raise match funding, appropriate to their economic context. When, at first we set match funding as an individual target, we only received applications from the US and Europe-based Producers.  So, we repositioned fundraising as a collective target, ensuring the burden was shared relative to the privileged position of individuals.

The investment fund projects encouraged the Creative Producers to utilise the expertise of local practitioners across disciplines and root their work in the communities they were hoping to benefit. Brilliantly, many of the Creative Producers directly involved other cohort members in their process, whether through one-on-one coaching or as panellists during the artist selection process.

While one creative project alone, no matter how innovative, cannot solve our cities’ complex problems, these projects demonstrate that simple interventions can make places more liveable, hopeful and collaborative. Over time, we hope that projects like these go further, support and speak to one another, becoming part of an ecology of answers that produce better futures.