Our Programmes
Essential, urgent and systemic change-making.
Inequalities and injustices persist. Resilience and wellbeing is depleted. Well-placed intentions are not matched with decisive and consistent action. Our resources, skills and assets are over-stretched, we’re doing more with less. Sound familiar?
There is a long-standing need for radical change across the sector: change to create equity, relevance, impact, environmental responsibility, collaborative leadership and resilience to name but a few. As committed instigators and enablers of culture and behaviour change, with a rich heritage in Organisational Development, we lead collaborative interventions that reimagine the future of arts and culture and generate lasting results for organisations and individuals.
For 2023, we’ve created programmes for organisations, individuals, groups, networks and movements to deliver on promises and create breakthroughs in areas that have proved hard to shift. Forming a partnership of equals, we have come together to devise an ambitious portfolio of programmes working at scale, across art forms and geographies to enact and embed culture change and organisational transformation.
Each programme tackles a distinct sectoral issue or challenge and interventions may vary. Our foundational principles of equity, inclusion, collaboration and co-creation are common to all.
Live or on their way in 2023
Office for Leadership Transition
The Office for Leadership Transition work with Boards and Executive Directors to transition their leadership teams and create inclusive change. We are committed to helping cultural leaders to enable a proactive, dynamic and supported transformation of representation at the tops of their cultural organisations to better reflect the audiences and communities that they exist to serve.
Creating Transformation
Creating Transformation provides sustained and immersive support for all arts and cultural organisations across the UK. With 18 months of intensive learning, workshops, mentoring, action learning, tools, resources and personal development Creating Transformation enables organisations to re-model, re-shape, realign, refocus and reimagine their futures. This programme is for organisations who are hungry to lead the sector to become more relevant, equitable, sustainable, resilient, dynamic, ambitious, creative and socially just.
Transforming Governance
A multi-layered change programme facilitating a national Governance Reset across all boards within the cultural sector, pro-actively supporting organisations to re-distribute power and agency and deliver on their responsibilities around representation and cultural democracy.
Brokering wider, deeper relationships
Our response to the recent ‘Addendum to guidance for NPO application’ from Arts Council England: a new brokering service to support you to create wider, deeper relationships across England, realising your goals for greater impact, and the Arts Council’s goal for more equitably distributed cultural investment, experiences and infrastructure.
Green Light: Programming for Environmental Responsabilty
A series of masterclasses, for organisations and practitioners looking for inspiration and tools to help them embed Arts Council England’s ‘Environmental Responsibility’ investment principle into their creative programmes for the upcoming NPO application round or beyond. This programme is in collaboration with Invisible Dust, a sector leader in curating climate art-science projects since 2009.
Organisational Development for Global Majority Cultural Workers
A co-created skills sharing and development programme for, with and by freelance cultural workers of colour who have experience of, or ambition to, support cultural organisations to transform, shift their cultures and develop new ways of working.
Holistic support and practices for organisational wellbeing
A bespoke and adaptive programme of holistic and wellbeing practices and perspectives, enabling individuals to recognise and hold their power, explore vulnerabilities, build their capacity for resilience and open to creating positive change.
Programmes in Delivery
Coventry City of Culture Leadership Programme
people make it work was asked to co-develop a Transforming Leadership bid to ACE with the City of Culture Trust, and is now the delivery partner for the Coventry City of Culture Leadership Programme. The cohort of 15 City Leaders who have or are experiencing barriers to accessing or progressing in the Cultural Sector are paid to be part of this 18 month long programme. We have co-created a curriculum for the programme that combines shared and individual objectives. The group reflect the city and come from all artforms, areas of Coventry, levels of expertise, ages and backgrounds.
Weston Jerwood Creative Bursaries Programme
people make it work is one of many partners working with Jerwood Arts to deliver the 4th edition of the Weston Jerwood Creative Bursaries programme. The programme supports 50 salaried jobs in arts and cultural organisations across the UK, for individuals from low socio-economic backgrounds. We work in collaboration with the Jerwood Arts team to develop the programme with a particular role in leading the Organisational Development strand that supports and enables organisations to lead change in relation to inclusive practice as well as a Professional Development programme for Fellows as they start their new roles with the organisations.
Programmes we have proudly delivered
CULTURE RESET
people make it work identified a need for a development programme to enable cultural producers to explore what is needed now – their own version of relevance – during this time of change (Covid, Race inequity, Climate Emergency, Let’s Create, Economic uncertainty) and created the Culture Reset programme during the summer of 2020.
Cultural Education Partnerships Programme
people make it work has developed a programme, funded by Arts Council England, to support a national movement of Cultural Education Partnerships to connect, learn and reimagine their future role collectively. With 162 participants and 97 CEPs represented, this marks the first national gathering of these place based partnerships and has been entirely co-created with the participants themselves and with Bridge Organisations, recognising the ecology of cultural learning provision across the UK.
Change Creation
Change Creation worked with 45 organisations of different scale and art form across the UK to lead and embed lasting change. In 2020 the programme adapted to provide urgent support for organisations facing uncertain futures, focussing on iterative business planning, social injustice and inclusion, new working practices, income and value, and understanding and meeting emerging audience needs in a changed environment.