After a substantial review of grant processes, following two years of highly responsive and dynamic grant giving, due largely to the impact of the Covid-19, the refreshed vision of cultural investment now supports the sector, individuals, organisations, and community groups to develop high quality culture and creativity in Wakefield.
Introduction
Wakefield Council has re-assessed its Culture Grant offer and seen a significant increase in engagement.
Revising our investment approach has ensured we support the ambition for Wakefield to be a truly creative district for our communities with effective and meaningful cultural investment, particularly as we build towards Year of Culture 2024.
The challenge
This approach has been informed by evaluation and learning from the past two years of grant giving, and in response to the extensive feedback and insight from communities and creatives of how best they need our support.
Following the outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic and the comprehensive lockdown of the UK in March 2020, Wakefield Council supported 17 local artists and arts organisations to explore creative responses to the impact this unprecedented time has had on our community’s lives. The local creatives received emergency grants as the arrival of the pandemic devastated economically the local creative sector.
The grants were a step change for the council in engaging with the creative sector in Wakefield, as many of the creatives that received the emergency grant support were new to the council, as well as bolstering and solidifying existing relationships.
We held an extended period of engagement with the creative and community sector to ensure we were redesigning our grants provision with their feedback and insight at the heart. They told us their challenges, frustrations and doubts in an open dialogue focused on how best to reformat our direct support and engagement. Accountability, transparency, trust, accessibility and diversity emerged as challenges we need to tackle.
The emergency grants, and feedback from the sector made us realise we had to refresh our grants to support cultural activity, be inspired by and led by residents of Wakefield, with an emphasis on improving the ambition of both creative activity and opportunities for engagement.
We had not previously captured applicant data, and so we have introduced equality and diversity monitoring to allow us to build a robust baseline to further our understanding of areas of improvement in terms of inclusivity and diversity in future years.
The solution
We led a substantial period of review of our grant processes. We held 21 public meetings and online sessions across the district, ran an anonymous survey and in total had 106 engagements in the grant’s development process.
The engagement to develop our grants consisted of significant engagement with the sector:
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Drop-in Engagement: We held around 60 interactions using a core question bank as the basis of all conversations.
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Master sheet commentary: this is the collated feedback from the initial conversations, as we started to shape up the new provision.
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We also had an open online survey which followed a similar format and focus and met with around 20 specialists for advice (other grant givers local/national/regional and experts in any of our grant areas e.g. cultural accessibility).
As a result, we developed our new 2022/3 Culture Grants core aims:
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To invest in the creative sector to contribute towards ensuring that Wakefield district is a place where new art is made, and creatives thrive.
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To invest in activity which enables increased engagement and participation across all communities in the district.
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To improve our processes and systems to become more accessible, inclusive, and relevant for creatives and community organisations to engage with.
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To develop an approach for cultural investment to ensure sector and community readiness for our ambitions for Year of Culture 2024.
The impact
The investment within Culture Grants for 2022/3 seeks to continue our commitment to support the wider cultural and creative ecology in the district. This realignment of our investment to ensure we can support individuals, communities and small creative organisations alongside our more established cultural organisations will ensure the Council is directly supporting the diverse cultural landscape of Wakefield to flourish.
Culture Grants 2022/3 will support the council’s Corporate Plan:
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Places to be proud of – supporting activity across the district and enabling Wakefield’s communities to make, attend and take part in creative experiences.
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An economy that works for everyone – investing in development projects, providing match funding to maximise support for the creative sector and prioritising skills development for creatives and communities.
We have completely refreshed the grants offer based on this feedback and are now experiencing unprecedented demand from the sector and are building a true picture of the ambition of the district. All our new documentation can be found on Wakefield's website.
The biggest step forward for quality has been to share detailed assessment criteria and the most significant change in terms of accessibility has been the audio versions, which read applicants with visual impairments but also a whole range of other interested parties who prefer auditory information.
How is the new approach being sustained?
We now run three rounds of our Culture Grants for creatives, and have a rolling deadline for community applications.
We are keen to continue to boost applications from the community sector for our smaller scale grants, so are producing case studies of new projects as they finish and complete evaluations. These are then published to both celebrate projects, and to help build confidence of potential future applicants and share successes/learnings too.
We have introduced monitoring for grant applicants to understand who we are reaching and develop a baseline from which to improve to be in line with our district population in future years. We have also standardised project reporting to ensure we can build an evidence base that reaches across the diversity of our investments.
We are also trialling a standardised project participant format and are interested to see if grant recipients for participatory projects are able to implement this. In addition, we are keeping a learning log, and any internal or applicant feedback on the process is being captured. Development shall take place in Autumn 2022 so that in January 2023 we can launch updated grants for the 23/24 financial year grants.
Across the district we are now developing a substantial Year of Culture 2024 and the Culture Grants will continue as a core element of activating and supporting cultural and creative activity across the district that will have a sustained impact.
Lessons learned
The lessons we have learned from along the way, was that our immediate action for emergency grant support for creatives in spring 2020 allowed us to be able to evidence need to support the creative sector in our district.
The past year has taught us that we need to make informed decisions via engagement with the sector and our communities as to how they want public funds to be spent on culture. We have started to adopt creative ways to engage, and to work hard to reach those who haven’t previously applied or enquired about our grant support. We know that we need to continue developing this to reach more people across our district.
We have connected with other local grant activity and are finding ways to work alongside other local funders and national funders. Previously our grants served our aims, but now we have developed grants that can be match support for national funders, and are seeking to collaborate with our other local givers.
We have discovered the importance of allowing time to review. We took the time to pause activity to refresh fully and thoughtfully, including a new re-brand of our grants, new ways to seek engagement, a simplified and a transparent approach to our paperwork.
We have found the benefit of our corporate long term visioning, working with our own corporate plan and large scale initiatives such as our proposed Year of Culture 2024 for the district, that we can continue to develop our inclusive economic recovery.
Finally, we have learned to be open to continue to grow. After conducting the largest engagement focused on improving our cultural grant support, we now are using our 2022/23 financial year to gather data, develop an ongoing learning log, and continual evaluation in order to improve our offer next year and towards 2024, all continued efforts to contribute to our district’s recovery from the Covid-19 pandemic.
Contact
Jenny Rogers, Cultural Development Manager, email: [email protected]