Case Study: Making the most of... creative responses to challenges
Responding to new challenges and supporting sector resilience
The CBC team continued to respond to new challenges, with the impact of COVID-19 on communities and creatives being a key area to address.
Due to the changing landscape and work post-COVID lockdowns CBC spoke to people across the cultural sector. Attending meetings, workshops, informal discussions, and listening to what our Creative Advisors and Associates are hearing across communities, we want to support ideas that can help us build resilience and continue to help nurture our network across the Black Country.
To do this the team have developed a number of ways to support people. These include:
Elevating partnerships to make more of joint opportunities
Developing new strands of work and commission opportunities
Fundraising initiatives
Supporting volunteering ideas
Supporting Cultural Compacts
Love Letters by Barbara and Marta
The F Words
During 2021 Creative Black Country worked with people across communities in the Black Country, as well as our partners on projects that emphasised fun and positivity.
We know that for some of us the future is starting to feel harder to imagine; to see it, hear it or feel it. Issues around loneliness has been exacerbated by COVID-19 and the restrictions on our daily lives so The ‘F’ Words was our way of focussing on fun, fabulous, feel-good activities that look to bring people together.
We collaborated with our friends at Black Country Touring on their ‘Dial-a-Story’ project to bring live music, storytelling and poetry direct to people’s homes via their phone. Talented artists offered a unique performance to people of all-ages and settings from care homes to blind/visually impaired groups.
Wolverhampton for Everyone hosted a week of creative workshops in the Mander Centre that helped people get creative with fun activities for all-ages across their network of voluntary and community groups.
We worked with Black Country based Deaf Explorer, d/Deaf creatives and d/Deaf communities on a series of online creative sessions that included advice on Lockdown looks and Live cooking (which included sessions with the Punk Chef, Scott Garthwaite, famous in the Deaf community for his TV series, Punk Chef on the Road).
Love letters was a project with artists Barbara and Marta that helped people design, compile and send love letter kits to separated/isolated families with people in care homes, hospital or just people they are not able to see.
Getting together to talk fundraising - there will be more opportunities in 2023
Fundraising Fellowship Scheme
Through our conversations with community groups and organisations, a theme was emerging around the capacity to fundraise.
There wasn’t;
- enough fundraisers
- enough staff time
- enough expertise
So CBC came up with the Fundraising Fellowship Scheme which was piloted at the beginning of 2022. We put a call out to our communities for Fellows and Host groups/organisations and matched them with an experienced fundraising Mentor.
The Scheme offered:
Fellows - training, mentor support and real-life experience to develop fundraising skills
Hosts - community groups, events and festivals, creative organisations - the option to host a ‘Fundraising Fellow’ to boost fundraising capacity or support applications for a project
We piloted 5 cohorts of Fellows, Hosts and Mentors. The findings of the pilot are available via yvonne@creativeblackcountry.co.uk and a further scheme will be introduced in 2023.