Core Members' meeting (March 2025) - reflections
A blog by Culture Counts Interim Director, Kathryn Welch.
On Thursday 20. March Culture Counts held a Core Members’ meeting at the beautiful Adam Smith Theatre in Kirkcaldy, Fife. This marked a return to in-person meetings for the first time in some years, following an online members’ meeting last December. We were welcomed to Fife by Fife Cultural Trust CEO Heather Stuart, launched our six new artist commissions in response to the theme “dreaming of a fairer future for Scotland”, then spent time in facilitated creative working groups. Here, we used mapping, collage, model-making and playlist creation to explore questions such as “What kind of environment would enable a fairer cultural sector?”, “What would our journey to get there look like?”, “What are the values and principles at the core of this work”, and “How do we make the whole greater than the sum of our parts?”.
The day was nourishing, lively and incredibly inspiring, with the artistic contributions fuelling really wide-ranging, ambitious and cross-sectoral conversations. I’ve come away bursting with ideas and questions for the future, a few of which include:
1. What should core members events look like in future?
I’m fascinated by the opportunities for exploring different kinds of events for our network, and for creating a programme engagement that is accessible, realistic (within busy diaries and limited energies), genuinely useful and properly engaging. This in-person event really showed the benefits of being together - to prompt unexpected conversations and connections, to take time to work in more exploratory ways, and to take space away from the everyday. We worked really hard to shape this event to make the most of being together in-person; one attendee told me that they usually come away from these sorts of events feeling drained, but this time felt energised and excited. But, of course, these events are comparatively expensive, they’re less accessible for those with further to travel, or with caring responsibilities or limited energy, and they ask a lot of people in terms of time commitments. Looking forward, I’m inspired by networks trialling different kinds of ways of ‘being together’. I see a future for Culture Counts that offers a menu of different engagement opportunities for the network - some virtual, some in-person (and in different locations across Scotland), some asynchronous or not event-based at all. And perhaps some that combine these in new ways - I was inspired by Culture for Climate Scotland’s recent Springboard conference, delivered online but with local watch-parties for people to come together in their own localities to chat, network and connect.
2. How do we use the arts for advocacy?
Whilst Culture Counts specialises in advocacy for the arts, we don’t always pursue advocacy via the arts. By that, I mean that advocacy often looks quite traditional - policy papers, written responses, formal committees and so on. Much of that is unavoidable and essential; working with our political systems and the ways they operate. Nevertheless, the arts are an incredibly powerful tool for communication - for touching people’s hearts, changing their minds, staying with us long after an event. Our six new artist commissions demonstrated this powerfully, and I had a number of really interesting conversations afterwards about the potential for bringing arts and artists more directly into spaces of advocacy. As a sector, we have this incredible resource of creative talent, and I’m excited to explore how we might use this more directly in our advocacy ambitions for the sector.
3. What enables cross-sector (and beyond the sector) collaboration?
Culture Counts has a distinctive opportunity via our whole-of-sector network, which includes arts, heritage and creative industry organisations. That's sometimes a challenge (what works for one part of the sector might cause issues for another), but is also a huge opportunity for building diverse, unexpected and really exciting connections. In Kirkcaldy, I sat between an archivist and someone from the gaming sector, who were having a really fruitful conversation about digital archives, the history and development of gaming, and collecting for the future. They were both thrilled to be in a conversation with someone who knew relatively little about the other’s part of the sector, but who could immediately see the opportunity and potential for collaboration. I was also struck by how many people told me they knew relatively few people at the Culture Counts event, despite being thoroughly immersed in their ‘own’ (geographic or artform) part of the sector. There’s a really exciting role for us here in building more active, diverse connections, and creating time and space for these relationships to unfold.
Culture Counts will soon have a permanent staff team in post, with a remit to explore these questions and more over the coming months. Meanwhile, if you’d like to chat about any of these questions, do get in touch with Kathryn Welch, Interim Director.