Partnerships for place

How to: core approaches 

To build partnership that can change the ecology of a place, it is important to identify specific organisations already active and rooted in everyday life and activity in a particular area. This expands the specific, local knowledge available to projects, and helps with design and delivery. It also creates new connections from which might evolve future activity, as seen during Covid.

Gross and Wilson encourage an explicit commitment to ‘holding open’ the cultural ecosystem, of which partnership is a vital element, but not the only thing needed. The partnership should not close off opportunity for others or become a new ‘closed group’. Good questions to test how this is being done are

• Do strategic plans keep ‘open’ who is engaged with, who can work in partnership, the relationships to local, regional, sectoral and national networks and structures and kinds of outcomes being produced?
• When things seem to be becoming ‘closed’ how the strategic approach be challenged to open it up? 

Create partnerships that are sustainable but also be ready for them to change as the circumstances of individual partners change. Alignment and clarity are especially important. What’s in it for each partner, and what’s asked of them?

Talk about arts engagement clearly and powerfully to bring new partners on board. For many the typical language of the arts, and the funding or other processes, are off-putting or opaque. 

Including artists early in the development of partnerships can avoid issues further into a project.

Dig deeper

• The cultural eco-systems of Creative People and Places Creating the Environment Jonathan Gross and Nick Wilson
• Building Partnerships Beyond The Arts: three case studies by Ecorys explore how Transported in Boston and South Holland, Heart of Glass in St Helens and East Durham Creates are developing collaborations with a range of partners outside the arts