Issue

Mainstream arts organisations wanting to diversify audiences and work with hard to reach communities do not always know how to access, connect with, work in or support progress in those communities.

 

Solution

We advocate that a key success factor is to work with community based youth workers to support any intervention. Youth workers are often the gatekeepers to those communities, but there is often a disconnect on both sides  due to a lack of understanding of each other, the work and remits, and the issues faced by themselves and the communities. 

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Culturepreneur Collective© piloted a new way of working to support more meaningful cultural engagement in “hard to reach” communities by working with community based Youth Workers as the key gatekeepers. We worked with and connected local youth workers (many of them young people themselves) and mainstream arts organisations.

 

Through a number of activities over 6 months we achieved:

• 518 project sessions;

• 183 project artist days;

• 36 new products;

• 71 artists' opportunities through the different integrated projects;

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These activities engaged:

• 12 arts/cultural organizations;

• A core group of c20 youth workers who are all networked to more;

• 581 participants (including young people);

• and a direct audience of 420…

 

A key finding was that arts organisations need to work with youth workers as they would work with teachers.  This will enable youth workers to prepare themselves and the young people for any project, support the project itself and understand the progression pathways.  This direct connection will be mutually beneficial and create wider impact.  We also explored a number of income generation projects that local youth workers could use to fund responsive activity, and identified the need for a youth worker network and campaign to support long term cultural engagement for social change.

 

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