CREATE PLACE is a leadership network focussing on mid to senior-career creative and cultural professionals. Currently, we have an MS Teams Virtual Learning Space, and we regularly organise events to support creative, cultural, heritage and library leaders to connect, share, and meet their challenges through a peer network of leaders at all levels.
Important terms in our cultural approach are co-creation, co-production and co-curation in the context of their places. We pay attention to the socio-economic contexts of second-order cities, including their usually rurally dispersed communities, and their need to attend to locality-specific, narrative-rich partnership work to engage hard-to-reach communities.
Our History
Between January 2020 and January 2023, we ran a fully Arts Council England-funded leadership programme, focussing on place-making and co-creation. Applications were invited from creative, heritage, library and cultural professionals that have a specific interest in placemaking and co-creation. This formed our current Create Place fellows and leaders network. You can find some of our fellows’ profiles and contact details you access here: https://padlet.com/carolabboehm/CreatePlaceFellows
Our inaugural leadership programme was created in 2019 by a network of cultural leaders based in North Staffordshire and Cheshire East and creative organisations with a remit for sector development. It offered essential management, leadership and cultural production skills, one-to-one coaching and live embedded experiences, benefitting from more than 16 cultural partners in the consortium. Fellows on the programme formed a close peer network and benefitted from direct access to leading cultural organisations. In addition, train-the-trainer sessions provided coaching skills for established cultural organisations.
Our Numbers
Between January 2020 and January 2023 we delivered 310 hours of train-the-trainer coaching sessions, and offered 91 fellows places on our leadership residentials, offering 5344 ohours of structured learning, with our fellows collectively investing 7322 hours of self-directed study.
Our leaders are diverse, with above average diverse ethnicity (40% self-declared non-British heritage, well above the national aberage of 24.4%). 55% of our fellows come from North Staffordshire and Cheshire East, 45% of fellows come from other parts of the UK and beyond.
Our future
Although, for now, the delivery of the leadership programme in the form of residentials has come to an end, we continue to support and invest in the future of our cultural & creative placemakers, the people who will innovate, develop and contribute to the narrative of our places, making our cities and regions feel like vibrant, lively, cultural places to live and be creative.
If you are a Create Place fellow and want to reconnect, let us know at CreatePlace@staffs.ac.uk
If you have not had the opportunity to benefit from our executive-style leadership programme, please watch this space as we will hopefully announce the next set of leadership residentials, CPD opportunities, or networking events soon.