Who we are
Why has the Culture In Our City site been created?
Culture in Our City has been created to support local cultural and creative workers with opportunities for connecting, professional development and skills support. Whether starting out, adapting, and growing, or in leadership, it’s a resource to help you flourish with others encouraging resiliency during challenging times and ambition for the future.
Who runs the Culture In Our City site?
The ABCD Plan for Cultural Recovery is led by the cultural sector, supported by Brighton & Hove City Council. The website is administered by the BHCC Arts Team. Its aims are delivered in collaboration with a group of cultural leaders within Brighton & Hove, coming together with the mission to champion the city’s arts and creative industries sector.
The site will only function well if the cultural community of the city also takes responsibility for sharing information, using it as a resource and keeping it live. The administrative team want to hear from you, so do get in touch!
What is the ABCD Plan for Cultural Recovery?
In the middle of the Covid-19 storm, Brighton & Hove’s cultural and creative sector came together. 100+ creative workers participated in 17 conversations over two weeks in September 2020, focusing on how one of the most vital sectors to the city’s economy might recover from the crisis.
The ABCD Plan for Cultural Recovery was created to help find more sustainable and inclusive ways to grow and protect the sector in the future, led by a group of local cultural leaders and working groups.
Read more on our Why We Exist, People and Cultural Framework pages.
What is the history of arts infrastructure in the city?
The city’s arts infrastructure has evolved over recent years and several strands support it.
Brighton & Hove Connected is an umbrella organisation, bringing together different parts of the public & private sector, as well as business, community, and voluntary sectors locally, so that different initiatives and services support each other and work together.
Brighton & Hove City Council Arts team provide leadership in the arts, cultural and creative sector as well as develop and shape cultural policies and strategies for the city.
In 2015 the Arts team set up the Arts & Creative Industries Commission to bring the local sector together and strengthen citywide connected thinking. They developed a Cultural Framework for the city designed to strengthen the sector.
In late 2020 the commission disbanded in order to prioritise the creation of the ABCD Plan for Cultural Recovery created in response to the Covid-19 pandemic. The plan was defined by key stakeholders in the city with a transparent governance structure and a series of working groups put in to place to deliver a coherent response to how the sector would remobilise.
What is the Cultural Framework for the city?
The Cultural Framework is a map of actions and long-term ambitions, designed to create ways to strengthen the future of Arts & Creative Industries throughout Brighton & Hove. You can read the written documentation produced here. We recommend ensuring any local funding applications you partake in link to this thinking.
We recognise that we are mid-pandemic and as such our current goals are focused on the sector’s protection and recovery. This work is being led by the ABCD Plan for Cultural Recovery.
Read more on our Cultural Framework page.
How do you support Inclusion across the city?
Commitment
The ABCD Plan for Cultural Recovery and the Cultural Framework have at their heart a commitment by the creative and cultural sector to cultural, ethnic and social pluralism in their organisations’ practices, processes and policies. This is expressed through a voluntary Inclusivity Charter, which organisations can adopt.
The first draft of the Brighton & Hove Cultural Inclusivity Charter is below.
Inclusivity Charter
We will actively promote the importance of reflecting a diversity of life experiences in our:
- Governing body
- Artistic practice (including learning & participation practice)
- Employment practice
- Audience development activities
- Internal and external communications
- Respect the diversity of life experiences of our staff team
- Encourage dialogue within the organisation, and with our partners, audiences and funders about the importance of plurality in society
- Report annually on what we have done, and the difference it has made to our customers/communities, artists and staff.
Working groups
Read more about the ABCD working groups and how you can get involved, via the People page.