Next steps

In the early months of 2023, we will ensure key decision makers in government and within the industry, both locally and nationally, receive copies of this 'Creative Workforce Workshops’ report on ‘Place’. We’ll ensure that our findings are shared with Creative UK as they consider their ‘Freelance Charter’ work and the Creative Industries Policy and Evidence Centre as they continue with their ‘Good Work’ review, as well as Metro Mayors as we collaborate together on ongoing place-based initiatives. We’ll also brief the Creative Industries Council and Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport as they develop future visions for our sectors that will shape development and funding for some time to come. 

 

At Culture Commons HQ we’ll be keeping each ‘Creative Workforce Workshops’ 'micro site' archived for future reference, to keep the voice of creative and cultural sectors of 2022 alive. However, we believe there is a future for the ‘Creative Workforce Workshops’ in 2023… 

 

Limitations and ambitions 

 

The funding profile and values we imbued in our ‘Place’ workshops has meant that, on this occasion, we were only able to focus on places within England. Furthermore, we’ve gathered significant learnings from running the 2022 round, including that engagement and outreach is needed to ensure more accurate representation across minoritised ethnic, gender, LGBTQIA, socio-economic and disabled groups. Given the creative and cultural sectors can be very different in each place, we acknowledge that we have only scratched the surface on differential lived experiences and unique conditions faced by individuals and sub-sectors. 

 

We are confident that further rounds of ‘Creative Workforce Workshops’ would add vital colour and depth to the observations and principles we’ve begun to establish here. We hope that in 2023 we will be able to create further ‘snapshots’ of evidence across each of the devolved administrations, diverse demographic groups and different sub-sectorss, to capture as representative and accurate a reflection of the lived experiences of the creative and cultural workforce as we can. This work will continue to feed into our ongoing advocacy efforts on behalf of our clients and partners, and for DCMS sectors more broadly.

 

We’ve been so encouraged by the standard and brilliance of our artist interpretations that we want to continue with our ambition to fuse policy with creative practice. We want to speak to representative groups described above and capture the sentiment of these conversations through increasingly innovative mediums such as dance, music and theatre, and continue to capture this together in living galleries of expression that can support in policy advocacy efforts. If you are an organisation operating in the creative and cultural sectors, or the research sector, and are interested in exploring the intersection between policy making and creative practice, we’d very much like to hear from you.