Supporting rural communities
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Most of my cultural life has been spent in market towns and rural areas. Working and living in the Welsh Valleys, Norfolk and now in rural Leicestershire, I have seen how vibrant and important culture is in rural communities.
But I also have first-hand experience of the challenges that rural communities face. Challenges relating to transport, housing and the changing rural economy. In recent years we’ve learnt a lot about how social mobility is lower in rural areas. All of these issues impact upon people’s engagement with culture.
To truly realise our mission of great art and culture for everyone, we need to take account of the needs and aspirations of rural communities.
In 2014 we published a Rural Position Statement that set out how we support culture in rural areas, then in 2015 we published a Rural Data and Evidence Review. These documents have been vital to inform how we work in and with rural areas.
We also established a Rural Stakeholders Group, which has given us valuable insight and helped to both challengeand support our thinking. Members are drawn from people working in museums, arts organisations such as the National Rural Touring Forum and libraries in rural areas, along with representatives of organisations like National Parks, Action for Communities in Rural England (ACRE) and local government. They meet with us twice a year to help us understand the issues that they face and to advise us about how we might respond to them.
This has had a positive impact on how we work. It helped us consider how best to serve rural areas as we made decisions on our 2018-22 National Portfolio.
It’s also helped us make investments in rural areas through our Strategic Funds such as Cultural Destinations , Creative Local Growth Fund and Great Place Scheme.
Our groundbreaking Creative People and Places programme invests in areas with low levels of cultural engagement, with the example of Transported, which works with communities in rural Lincolnshire. We’ve also worked with new partners in rural areas, including Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty (AONBs), who are supporting artists to help engage people with environmental challenges and innovative artistic commissions focusing on the countryside and the communities which live there.
To continue this work, and with the help of our Rural Stakeholders Group, we’ve now updated our Rural Data and Evidence Review and used this to inform a new Rural Position Statement.
These will help us make better policy, design better programmes and make better investment decisions.
Although the Position Statement will only be in place for a year, taking us up to our new ten year strategy in 2020, it has a vital role. It will work alongside the Data and Evidence Review to inform the development of the new strategy, making sure that we fully consider how we work with rural communities. I hope that our partners in national and local government, find these documents useful too.
People often lazily assume that innovation and influential practice is the domain of cities but here in the UK we have brilliant examples of rurally based cultural organisations acting as trailblazers and artistic inventors.
When I think about culture in England’s rural communities I think about internationally renowned organisations and festivals like Grizedale Arts, Yorkshire Sculpture Park; or Inside Out Festival; Live&Local bringing arts and culture to communities across the Midlands; of Libraries Unlimited supporting library services in Devon and the Museum of English Rural Life, with perhaps one of the best social media of any museum in the world.
As we think about the next decade and develop and deliver our new strategy we’ll put the needs of different places at the heart of our thinking.
The example and expertise of our rural cultural sector, alongside our refreshed Position Statement and new Data and Evidence Review give us a sound basis to work from.
