Learning through the pandemic: introduction

Background

This is one of a series of five articles showcasing the interim insights of the Learning through the pandemic project.

Common Vision and Creative United have been commissioned by Arts Council England to deliver the project, listening to cultural practitioners and sharing community engagement and participation best practice from the first two years of the pandemic.

Each of these articles are a preview of content which will appear in a final playbook; they include an overview of the learnings under this theme followed by practical resources you can explore. The playbook will expand on this with top-tips, case studies and consideration points

This article was written by Matilda Agace, Senior Research and Engagement Manager, Common Vision.

Learnings 

The New Year is often a time to look for new horizons and rise to new challenges. But the start of 2022 sees the creative and cultural sector faced with an all-too familiar sense of uncertainty and unpredictability. That’s not to say, though, that we cannot learn how to navigate these uncertain times. 

Over the course of the last two years, many cultural organisations and practitioners have provided a vital support role in communities in response to the pandemic. The nature of this support has been wide ranging, improving people’s wellbeing, connection, and purpose in diverse ways. Through workshops and interviews with practitioners from across the UK, we heard inspiring examples of how creativity and culture has helped tackle loneliness, ill-health, poverty, discrimination, and digital exclusion, alongside boredom, isolation, and stress. 

At the same time, many cultural organisations have faced real barriers in reaching isolated members of the community and sustaining engagement in culture through successive lockdowns. Whether through a lack of resources, underdeveloped community networks, skills gaps, furloughed teams, or funding pressures, this has been an intense learning period for many organisations and practitioners. We heard that many organisations often didn’t have time to be strategic at the start of the pandemic, they just tried to do whatever they could to keep going during lockdowns and keep community members supported. 

As we experience the long tail of the Covid-19 crisis, we hope that insights and learnings from our research will help cultural organisations make strategic decisions about what approaches they try, how they work with different audiences and wider communities, the ways they allocate resources, and how they articulate and evaluate their social impact. 

A cornerstone of being responsive to the challenges posed by the pandemic is having a first-principles understanding of the communities you engage and the relationships you want to build on as an organisation or practitioner. You might refer to these communities as audiences, participants, beneficiaries, members or stakeholders – and you will inevitably need to plan for how you sustain existing relationships and nurture new ones amidst uncertainty and a changing operational context. 

Resources

These optional resources are practical guides for taking stock and planning ahead on this basis. Understanding the communities we engage is vital in rebuilding a strong and inclusive cultural sector in which “the creativity of each of us is valued and given the chance to flourish” (Let’s Create, 2020) and may be useful when thinking about how your organisation or practice connects and builds relationships with different communities and audience groups. 

OF/BY/FOR ALL: Quick community mapping guide: This community mapping guide is not pandemic-specific but may be useful when starting to think about what communities you may need to support and engage in this time. They estimate it’ll take you and your team about an hour to work through.

Relationships Project: Toolbox: A set of beautifully designed materials to help you reflect on and develop the relationships you or your organisation hold. The guides for relationship makers, and bridge builders between communities may be particularly helpful for arts and cultural organisations. 

Community Covid planning canvas: A worksheet produced for community leaders and third sector organisations at the start of the pandemic. It uses seven question prompts to help you consider needs, resources, and support for your community.

The National Lottery Communities Fund/RESOLVE: Communities Toolkit: A series of three exercises developed in parallel to The Emerging Futures Fund. These exercises could be useful for starting points offer working with your communities to reflect, listen, imagine, and develop new work during this time.

Crafts Council: Planning community projects toolkit: A concise toolkit that walks you through planning co-creation as part of work to engage your communities. It has three activities to work through: a ‘why co-create?’ canvas; a ‘control-ometer’, and a project design and decision-making tool.

Locality: Top tips for community engagement: The first three resources on this page – The seven principles of local marketing; Top tips for community engagement, and how to get and keep local people involved in your work – are useful to planning any creative work that seeks to engage and support local community members. The more in depth guide, ‘Engaging your community in a meaningful way’, walks you through different methods of physical and digital community engagement, weighing up the pros and cons of each. 

Involve: Participatory methods: Involve are a public participation charity and much of their work focuses on democracy in public institutions, however their ‘methods’ guide could be useful to arts practitioners as they consider different ways to involve community members and democratise culture.

NPC: Coronavirus response toolkit for charities: A useful starting point for any third sector organisation working to adapt activities and processes during the pandemic. The resources it signposts on monitoring and evaluation may be particularly useful, such as the five types of data explainer.

Other articles in this series look at engaging with communities in specific contexts – from transitioning online to connecting with people in their home environments. A consolidated set of resources and materials will be available in a forthcoming ‘Learning from the pandemic playbook’ due to be published by Common Vision in early 2022.