Cultural compact: How to fund grassroots arts and boost wellbeing in deprived places

Reboot an arts venue with Bilbao-effect architecture and the rest will follow – that was the regeneration playbook as written twenty years ago. The latest thinking, however, flips that old trope on its head and asks how we can support grassroots culture and public engagement in arts production.

According to a recent report from Key Cities – a national network of 27 cities across the UK, the social benefits of participation in culture demands a more inclusive approach to stimulating and funding the arts economy. In particular, the report stresses the link between low cultural engagement and deprivation. 

Culture and Place in Britain: How arts and culture help to create healthier and more prosperous places for everyone, published in collaboration with Arts Council England, highlights the role culture plays in supporting health and wellbeing – especially in areas of socioeconomic deprivation. 

Increasingly, research supports the idea of social prescribing to prevent loneliness and support wellbeing, with medical advice to pursue cultural activities such as a dance or a drawing class as an affordable and cost-effective way to increase health in deprived places.

“Culture has come out of the elitist box, and it’s being recognised as something of wider benefit to society,” says Alan Waters, Key Cities lead on culture and former leader of Norwich City Council, in an interview for to The Developer Podcast which is available to stream now.

“The impact of Covid was a factor in people appreciating how important [taking part in] cultural activities is to people’s sense of wellbeing and connectedness,” Waters adds, reflecting on the YouTube symphony performances, collective clapping and balcony singing that brought comfort during lockdowns.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                          

Report contributor Sarie Maire Slee, Strategic Lead at Northern Place and Culture Partnership and the former Head of Partnership at Salford Culture and Place Partnership, uses a forest analogy to explain why supporting grassroots culture, not just Bilbao-scale institutions, is important to a thriving place. “If you have lots and lots of big trees and it’s not managed, that will shade out everything else,” says Slee, pointing out that forests have trees, but also mulch and fungi, upon which the ecosystem depends.   

The report cites “cultural compacts” as a useful mechanism for bringing big institutions and community arts together to create a shared vision and source funding. A cultural compact is a partnership between large and small arts organisations in a given place: “It’s a way of bringing all cultural institutions, from anchor institutions to independent creatives, together under one big tent… to build greater capacity through collective action, and look to get investment – private investment, local authority investment, government investment and council investment,” says Waters.

Slee says Salford has one of the oldest cultural compacts, which formed in 2017 when four anchor institutions – Arts Council England, Salford City Council, the University of Salford and The Lowry – singed a memorandum of understanding. The compact has grown to include the RHS, the BBC and many smaller organisations. “Having a compact means that you’ve agreed that you want common ground,” says Slee. “It’s not a cookie cutter model. The beginning is similar but the trajectory for each compact is different.”

The process begins with all the arts initiatives coming together to create a shared vision which then becomes critical to unlocking investment. The investment can then be shared out in line with the compact’s mission.

“It starts with getting your house in order and deciding what matters,” says Slee. “What are we going to prioritise and what stubborn needs in our place are not being met.” These conversations can be difficult and uncomfortable, Slee admits, but it’s an essential step on the road to investment and ultimately makes the compact more appealing to investors.

“You need a clear vision about what you want to do,” Waters adds, “so [an investor] can see where all of this fits in.”

The council has a critical role to play in the creation of the compact, because of the “convening power that councils and cities have to bring people together,” Waters explains.

Waters stresses the need for devolution to really unlock places, but underlines that it needs to be a devolution that is properly resourced. “The devolution models that we have are still very restricted and resource limited.”

“What we have at the moment is a competitive model. There’s a big difference in spending power that localities have, and there’s the continuing need for an equalisation mechanism,” says Waters. “[Devolution] will need a national programme of investment, not a competitive and scattergun process that results in places that are successful and places that are less successful.

“Culture is not just important in some places, it’s important everywhere. Proper sustained investment nationally is going to improve things immensely. It’s also going to be a very good use of spending.”