Puncturing the bubble
Lynsey O’Sullivan is Director of Learning & Engagement at The Lowry. In this case study on the theme of ‘civic engagement & social relevance’, she explores key questions related to how we value community arts practice, how great art can also explicitly set out to deliver social change, and how to meaningfully place communities at the heart of programmes.
This case study was sourced by Culture24 as a resource for our conference, The art of leadership.
The Lowry is the most visited cultural venue in Greater Manchester and delivers a cross-arts participation programme, engaging more than 30,000 people each year, with a focus on socially-engaged arts practice.
It is no secret that arts and culture, as a sector, is facing significant challenges around diversity and access. In responding to this we knew that our change needed to be radical, not only to tackle access and diversity, but also to challenge the traditional parameters of ‘community engagement’ in a way that would change the preconception that ‘community arts practice’ is of a lesser value than other areas of our work.
New practice
Six years ago, we decided to make a fundamental change to our Learning and Engagement strategy to develop a new methodology of practice. The objective of this systemic change was to better ensure that our organisation is rooted in our local community in an authentic and sustainable way; to achieve more significant social impact through high quality arts and culture.
More specifically, in making these changes we aimed to centralise and re-focus our mission to be one which aims to use the arts as a tool for community regeneration, and social and political change; and key to this would be placing young people at the heart of our Learning and Engagement programme .
Since 2011 The Lowry has been engaged in a pioneering partnership with Salford Young Carers Service, aiming to use arts and culture as a medium to give vulnerable and isolated young carers a voice to influence social change. We are extremely proud to be working across our city to ensure that arts and culture are at the table, as part of the statutory approach for children, young people and communities in Salford.
This partnership has grown its delivery and resources year on year to engage more than 12,000 children and young people through arts and culture to raise awareness of young carers issues, to identify hidden young carers, and to challenge health and education sectors to offer better support to these vulnerable children
Process
From 2011–16 The Lowry and Salford Young Carers Service delivered long-term sustained arts engagement programmes for young carers in Salford. These resulted in a series of films to be used as education and training resources in education and health settings. These participation projects were led by the young people themselves, and the content of the films were created by young carers in Salford alongside professional film makers, actors, writers and directors. These films are now used each year to facilitate part of the personal, social, health and economic education curriculum across all high schools in Salford, as well as elsewhere in the UK, Ireland and Australia.
In 2017 The Lowry commissioned and co-produced a piece of professional theatre. Who Cares was made by The Lowry and LUNG Theatre Company in partnership with Salford Young Carers Service, and is based on a year of interviews with four young carers from Salford.
Through Who Cares we aimed to test whether we could achieve high-quality artistic excellence in a professional touring production which would also be equally rooted in and led by principles of ‘applied’ approaches in all aspects of its production to achieve significant social outcomes across England.
The Lowry gained support from two organisations, Curious Minds (North West Bridge Organisation) and The Oglesby Charitable Trust to tour the play, with accompanying resources and training packages. We partnered with OnSide Youth Zones and Aldridge Education to identify areas of significant deprivation across England to develop a touring circuit across these national youth/education organisations so that the play could reach a range of schools and youth centres across England. Who Cares visited a diverse range of 26 high schools and OnSide Youth Zones before ending at the House of Lords in Westminster.
In each area, the local young carers service attended the performance and The Lowry delivered a creative learning programme of wrap-around support and resources to offer on-going support for young people and professionals.
Challenges
In producing Who Cares, we aimed to have a dual focus on artistic quality and social change, and ‘test’ whether these things could exist in real equality or not. Throughout the process we agreed that all decisions were to be made democratically, involving young people, artists and non-arts stakeholders. By doing this, the ‘non-experts’ in each area were having a say in the others area of work and the usual hierarchy of decision making within a creative process was abandoned.
We had to set up an environment of heightened awareness throughout the creative process across the artists, young people and stakeholders involved. At every stage, each decision was challenged and tested. All the usual processes of working with artists and young people were re-visited, and we interrogated each other constantly on our motivations at each step.
As a result, the process was much slower and more laborious, and the pace of the creative process was often stunted and dictated by this new set of principles we had constructed around ourselves. From casting, to tour programming, to design and direction, each decision involved the collective and we had to evidence that our choices had been collectively made, with no one voice having any more authority than another. The pull and push of this interaction was, at times, both bruising and tiring – it made things harder and slower than ‘usual’.
Lessons learnt
Strong relationships during this process were crucial, and the communication needed to be equally as strong, taking each step at a time. The theory of change was crucial to this, as it gave us a clear set of unifying objectives that we could return to at each stage of the process – to revisit the ‘why’ was helpful when we were lost in the mist of the ‘do’.
It is sometimes easier in these situations to get mission drift or to take the easier or quicker option, so we had to work hard to ensure we were accountable and transparent at all times to each other.
Impact
Over 4,000 young people, teachers, youth workers and politicians across England have participated in the Who Cares arts participation programme. Who Cares was presented to over 100 MPs and political decision makers at the House of Lords, giving young carers a voice to fuel a drive for change in policy which has resulted in a national political campaign launching in June 2018
An extract from an independent evaluation on this work concluded:
‘The Lowry have been successful in ‘puncturing the bubble’ of statutory services and there is much to share with the wider sector in terms of how these relationships are initiated and facilitated. Partnerships have allowed for a ‘cross pollination’ of skills, so that, for example, Young Carer’s services across the country are now using the arts as they have seen modelled at The Lowry, to generate better educational and social outcomes for these vulnerable children.
The bespoke nature of The Lowry’s work with young people facing significant disadvantage and poverty of opportunity has taken partnership working across sectors into new territory. This multi-agency working allows The Lowry a holistic overview of a participant’s situation and to identify the contribution it is possible to make as an arts organisation sitting alongside other support services within health, education and sport.’
Future plans
We have developed a model which allows us to work in a sustained way with four key groups of young people over the next four years and beyond; Young Carers, Looked After Children & Care Leavers, Young parents and Young people experiencing Homelessness.
This work is now core to our Learning and Engagement programmes moving forward, but it is also core to our organisational mission. This is now one quarter of all of our work across Learning and Engagement at The Lowry. It has transformed the way in which young people who had not previously accessed arts and culture have now moved on to other areas of our programme, including talent development.
We are planning to launch a new campaign around Who Cares later this year and through this, share some of our learning, alongside our associate artists, with the sector about the ways in which community engagement work can sit equally alongside artistic excellence – warts and all!
Advice for colleagues
There isn’t a one-size-fits-all approach; Community and Engagement work should be authentic and specific to the context of the community, artists and organisations that are involved.
Key to all aspects of this work is that it should not feel like an add-on or something that has been inherited from past ‘projects’ or temporary initiatives of times gone by – just because it has ‘always been done that way’.
We need to challenge ourselves to really question, at all levels of our organisation, who is it for? Why are we doing this? What is the actual impact of this work and what isn’t working well?
For those of us who work in Community and Engagement in the arts, we inherently feel the need to justify or prove its value and therefore we’re not always used to admitting something isn’t working. To do this in a safe and secure environment you need to feel trusted and supported to make those changes and to share as much about what hasn’t worked as what has. Critical friend relationships with external peers are crucial to this too.
Resources
Blog from The Lowry on Salford Young Carers
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