Creative Black Country (CBC) is a £2m funded project that has been commissioned by the Arts Council England, Creative People and Places (CPP)
programme.
The aim of the CBC project is to get more people and communities within the Black Country experiencing and inspired by the arts, and more specifically to:
- Support people in the Black Country to promote and commission great art.
- Develop local people’s skills and confidence to choose what art they want to see and which artists they want to work with.
- Create new and lasting partnerships between those who create and present art and people in the voluntary, business and public sectors.
- Strengthen demand for the arts in and beyond the Black Country by showing their value – simply, clearly and convincingly.
The programme is being driven by a Consortium of organisations comprising Sandwell Council of Voluntary Organisations, Wolverhampton Voluntary Sector Council and Walsall Voluntary Action (working as Black Country Together CIC), Multistory and Black Country Touring.
CCU evaluation of Creative Black Country
The Creative Communities Unit has been commissioned to undertake an evaluation of activities that have taken place during the first year of the Creative Black Country programme.
To find out more about the Creative Communities Unit’s involvement in Creative Black Country, please contact Nic Gratton.
Case study: collecting monitoring data
Monitoring data was collected at a Creative Black Country Open House event using a creative evaluation tool: ‘mini me stickers’.
Monitoring data can be difficult to gather from large audiences, as some people view filling out a form with some suspicion, even when personal contact details are not required. To help counter this, at the Open House event, commissioned by Creative Black Country, we instead asked people to make a ‘mini me’, a picture made up of stickers that told us information about their age, gender, ethnicity and whether they considered themselves to have a disability of life limiting illness.
The participants were offered a set of stickers that had different coloured heads (gender), bodies (ethnicity), legs (age) and hats (disability or life limiting illness). They chose stickers that represented them and made a picture on a sheet of paper. We then displayed the pictures on a washing line which was draped across a gazebo.
The tool was fun to complete and the stickers attracted people to the activity. People also appeared more willing to complete this activity than fill in a form. The resulting display also helped to demonstrate the diversity of the audience as very few were the same.