Throughout the CreaTures project, we have spoken with policy makers and funders and others that support creative practice. We have focused on variations of the question: how can policy, funding, and other types of support unlock the power of creative practices for better futures?
We have had these conversations in different contexts and at different levels. We have spoken locally with policy makers and funders in Scotland, the Netherlands, and Finland. We have also had exciting dialogues and workshops based not on location but on theme: around ecology and the more-than-human, and around games and play.
These dialogues have been very enlightening – it is clear that there is an increasing interest among among our interviewees in the power of creative practices as a pathway for societal change. But there are also some real challenges.
Firstly, there is a question of how to meaningfully link creative practice and societal change. On the one hand, creative practices run the risk of being instrumentalized and flattened by policy for social change purposes, and in the process, what is unique and powerful about them might be lost while putting more pressure on already precarious creatives. On the other hand, there is a real need to make the value of creative practices for change legible and communicable, somehow, to unlock resources and institutional support.
Secondly, the contexts for creative practices present real complexity as well. And it’s not simply a matter of getting inert societal systems to shift. As the pandemic has clearly demonstrated, the world is changing all the time. Existing power structures do not remain in place just because they are simply ‘there’. Instead, lots of creativity and effort goes into helping the people and systems that are currently in charge stay on top in a changing world. Our team member Richard Lane has referred to this type of non-transformative creative work as ‘shadow CreaTures’. In other words, creative practices are trying to stimulate change in a world that is constantly changing, just not toward more sustainable and eco-social futures.
The CreaTures project has been wrestling with these challenges. We have created two resources for policy and funding as a response:
- a reflective evaluation approach using 9 dimensions to connect creative practices to eco-social change;
- higher level insights about what needs to change in the policy and funding contexts of creative practice
Our interviews with policy makers, funders and others made it clear that many in such positions have a deep sense that creative practices might be a powerful pathway to stimulate societal change.But this sense is often at least partly intuitive and anecdotal, while existing ways of tracking impact such as visitor numbers or simple diversity measures fail to capture the richness of the practice. CreaTures has combined dialogues from practice with a deep dive in many relevant fields of literature to build a robust set of 9 dimensions that can be used to describe how creative practice matters for societal change; and to reflect on and evaluate real life work in this regard.
The dimensions are organized along three types of change: changing meanings (embodying, learning, imagining); changing connections (caring, organizing, inspiring), and changing power (co-creating, empowering, subverting). These 9 CreaTures dimensions can be used for evaluative purposes, but also to design funding calls and to frame policies and strategies.
For more on the 9 dimensions, see here: