A new chapter for Culture Counts: Four working questions
June 2025 marks the beginning of a new chapter for Culture Counts, as Joe Peach and I take up the reins of joint leadership as Directors. Neither of us are entirely new here – I’ve been at the helm as Interim Director for the past eight months, whilst Joe has been a core part of the Culture Counts team over the past four years. Nonetheless, this marks an opportunity to look with fresh eyes at Culture Counts, and at its role, remit, reach and impact.
I’ve been inspired over the past few years by Leah Black’s leadership of Edinburgh’s Regerative Futures Fund, and in particular by her commitment to ‘working in the open’; transparently sharing the thinking, processes and development of ideas that often remain hidden behind the scenes. In that spirit, I’m sharing here some developing thoughts that are guiding my work in this new role of Director: Network, projects and partnerships.
QUESTION 1: Who forms the Culture Counts network?
QUESTION 2: What is Culture Counts’ distinctive opportunity to make an impact?
QUESTION 3: How do we create accessible and engaging opportunities to connect - with Culture Counts, and across the network?
QUESTION 4: What is our responsibility to the wider sector?
Below, I’m sharing my initial thoughts on each of these questions. I hope they will spark further thoughts, questions and ideas as you read, and I’d love to hear from you to fuel the next steps in taking these questions forward over the coming weeks, months and years.
QUESTION 1: Who forms the Culture Counts network?
Culture Counts’ greatest strength is our network, which is made up of representative bodies who collectively represent the diversity of the arts, heritage and creative industries in Scotland. Many of these organisations specialise in an artform or artforms (like Craft Scotland or Film Hub Scotland), others focus geographically (such as Creative Dundee or OnFife) or by a particular shared issue or interest (including Culture for Climate Scotland and Arts, Culture, Health and Wellbeing Scotland). A number support the interests of artists, freelancers and the creative workforce (e.g. BECTU, Equity, Musicians Union). This ‘whole of sector’ reach is vital to Culture Counts’ role.
However, it’s also the case that this network structure risks amplifying some voices more than others, leaving parts of the sector that are traditionally less well networked, more newly-established, more precarious, or less well-resourced at risk of being further disenfranchised by under-representation within the Culture Counts network. This calls for a flexible network model that embraces that diversity of ways that our sector organises, represents and advocates for itself. And that requires a proactive identification of perspectives that are under-represented within our existing network; a process which began at the end of 2024 with a significant expansion of our Steering Group.
To this end, I’ll soon be sharing a new statement of Culture Counts’ network eligibility. This will make clear which people, organisations and representative bodies might seek to join the network, offer transparency over the processes of the network, and make clear our offer and expectations – both to those within our network and the wider sector. We’ll be updating our admin processes around membership too, to make that smoother and more efficient for us all.
Add your own thoughts to this question here.
QUESTION 2: What is Culture Counts’ distinctive opportunity to make an impact?
We’ve been thinking carefully about how to use our capacity most effectively to maximise our usefulness and impact. Here, we’re thinking especially about the first two parts of Culture Counts’ mission, which is to:
promote the public benefit of the arts, heritage and creative industries, and
protect the eco-system of the arts, heritage and creative industries for our common future; through administration and policy change.
We’re confident that the greatest opportunity here comes from our work with high-level policy and decision makers who influence the future of the arts, heritage and creative industries (that includes funders, Government, senior civil servants and so on). We think that what we can do best is (on the one hand) to gather, understand and interrogate the complexity and nuance of experiences across the breadth of the sector, and (on the other) to build trusted, informed relationships with those in decision-making roles. Then, the opportunity for us is to present an accessible, compelling and robust case for the arts, focussing on the areas where there’s a potential for change (over the long or short term), and distilling the core messages without over-simplifying. That understanding helps clarify and focus our work - to prompt wide-ranging conversation across the sector (and with other sectors, too), and to create compelling, timely and robust cases for support.
Add your own thoughts to this question here.
QUESTION 3: How do we create accessible and engaging opportunities to connect - with Culture Counts, and across the network?
This is possibly the most exciting, and one the most visible, parts of what we offer to our network. We’ll certainly be continuing to host meet-ups for our Core Members (likely a mix of online and in-person events), and will continue as Secretariat to the Cross Party Group on Culture and Communities, too. Both Joe and I will also be offering regular ‘office hours’, where you can book a 30 minute slot to check in, ask questions, share thoughts or bring matters to our attention (you can book these with Joe or Kathryn here).
Beyond that, I’d like to explore some more flexible, innovative and lighter-touch opportunities for those within our network to feed into policy consultations, manifesto asks and advocacy opportunities as they develop. This might include:
focussed drop-in sessions or quick Google forms to help us ‘take the temperature’ of the sector on emerging issues,
short-term working groups (like the forthcoming EDI co-learning and policy network) for us to work together on a matter of shared interest for a defined period,
support for members of the network to connect, visit, or work together, and to share their learning with the rest of the network
opportunities to hear from cultural leaders around the world via one-off events
a reimagination of how we come together, with smaller meet-ups across the country or via new models of digital engagement (such as those tested by Culture for Climate Scotland at their 2025 Springboard conference)
Add your own thoughts to this question here.
QUESTION 4: What is our responsibility to the wider sector?
Culture Counts advocates for the entirety of the arts, heritage and creative industries sector, which we do through our network of Core Members. As such, our relationship will always be closest with those who are part of our network, but we’re keen to maintain dialogue with the sector beyond that network too. Subscription to our monthly Journal is open to all, and we’ll be looking to refresh the approach to that publication once recruitment of our (third and final) team member - Engagement and Communications Manager, is complete.
There’s also a key role with the wider sector in realising the third part of our organisational mission, to ‘demystify the operations of Government and Parliament; allowing more people from the arts, heritage and creative industries to influence policies that impact on them’. We’ll be carefully considering how best to achieve this mission, to extend the potential and impact of arts advocacy far beyond that we can realise directly, by increasing the advocacy skills and capacity of the sector as a whole.
In general, Culture Counts doesn’t have the remit or capacity to take on large-scale public awareness campaigns aimed at the general public, nor to actively work on the individual or local campaigns led by our network. That said, we’ll sometimes partner with others to realise key campaigns (such as the #InvestInCulture campaign in the run up to the December 2024 Scottish budget announcement), contribute briefing, research and analysis to campaigns being undertaken by members and partners, or to explore the role that arts and artists play in touching people’s hearts, challenging our ideas, and influencing long-term social and political change. And we hope there’s a natural harmony and resonance between the high-level campaigns led by Culture Counts, the detailed and specific work led by our network and those they represent, and our advocacy support under our ‘demystification’ mission.
Add your thoughts to this evolving thinking
We’re keen to develop this evolving approach with input from the sector. Whether you’re already a Core Member of Culture Counts, someone who’s watched our work from the outside, or you hold a strategic role that works with Culture Counts in shaping cultural policy, we’d love to hear your views on the four working questions above.
We’ve created a really simple Typeform document, which invites your thoughts on each of these areas, which will remain open for your thoughts through June and July 2025. You can write as much or as little as you like, on one or more of the prompt questions, and all responses are anonymous. Do share your thoughts here.