Placing creativity at the heart of climate justice, developing action with local communities.
CULTIVATE was a regional leadership programme, running May 2021 – October 2023, for creative practitioners and local communities to collaboratively explore new ways of embedding creativity at the core of grassroots collective action for climate justice, across the Tay region.
The Tay region is geographically, socially and economically diverse. CULTIVATE supported creative practitioners and local communities to engage, create and produce locally relevant work, and enabled regional learning and sharing around being a sustainable place to live, play and visit.
Environmental challenges were made starkly visible over the course of the COVID-19 pandemic, with inequalities more often felt by those with the least say. The climate crisis presents some of the most critical, pressing and systemic issues of our time, and we believe that resolutions must also come from community-led organising and cross-disciplinary collaboration.
Creative practitioners are leading the charge for change, enabling a transition into a sustainable creative ecology for the resilient wellbeing of our communities. They are also well equipped to engage people and support local networks to imagine collective actions and communicate them.
The CULTIVATE programme included:
Two rounds of 12 Creative Practitioner freelance commissions, in partnership with communities across Dundee City, Perth and Kinross, Forfar and North East Fife. Each project engaged with groups on the fringes — younger generations, people facing poverty-stigma, people from the global majority, and those in rurally isolated communities — and facilitated space for people to come together to imagine, envision, co-develop and embed creative responses locally.
The programme also included an Open Community Programme for anyone interested in social/environmental justice, exploring how to bring creative climate topics to the high street. Events and workshops were delivered with partners on topics including; climate justice, power and privilege, generational thinking, and collaborative working.
Over the project, across the Tay region:
Led by Creative Dundee over three years, and funded by Creative Scotland’s Culture Collective, this pilot project brought together creative practitioners and community groups to explore climate justice in a practical and meaningful way.
The CULTIVATE programme also enabled creative practitioners to:
CULTIVATE was delivered in collaboration with a number of partners, including Dundee City Council and Perth & Kinross Council.
#CultivateTay
CULTIVATE has been a significant catalyst project for Creative Dundee, enabling our organisation to demonstrate the potential when trust is placed in small, yet capable, well networked organisations. We’re grateful to Culture Collective, funders, partners, Creative Practitioners and Communities for their belief and support throughout. The programme was iterative by design, with review, reflection and redesign built in throughout to improve the pilot project as it evolved during and post-pandemic.
For the second round of CULTIVATE Creative Practitioner freelance commissions, we collaborated with a learning partner, tialt//there is an alternative, who worked in close relationship with the producer, wider Creative Dundee team and commissioned creative practitioners to reflect and share more about the programme’s approaches, processes and impacts.
We are pleased to share our key learnings and the full report:
Illustrations by Chloe Gardiner
Power, Privilege, and Systems
Addressing unequal power dynamics and systemic inequalities impacting climate justice.
Intersectionality and Ecology
Recognising the interconnected nature of social categories in climate change impacts.
Future Making and Thinking
Balancing visionary future creation with practical limitations, emphasising systemic change.
Role of Artists
Highlighting artists’ roles in community building, storytelling, and envisioning futures.
The ambition of CULTIVATE was to pioneer a model which resourced Creative Practitioners and Communities across the Tay region to navigate climate justice through creativity and community connection. As a new initiative which launched at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, and continued through the recovery period, CULTIVATE provided commissions and community engagement to enhance local activities and foster skills and confidence for stronger community cohesion.
CULTIVATE launched in May 2021, with an open-call for an initial round of six commissions responding to briefs initiated by community organisations across the Tay region.
Emerging and established artists researched, developed and generated creative responses through deep engagement with the host organisation’s community—from people facing poverty-stigma to those in rurally isolated communities. Through arts, culture and creativity, the practitioners facilitated space for people to come together and imagine, share, celebrate, organise, plan and act for the future.
The first commissions included:
The various processes and approaches which were developed and used included: practising radical hospitality; amplifying and celebrating people’s experiences through creativity; networking, learning, and sharing with peers; and exploring collective actions that have multiple benefits.
The Creative Practitioners also had opportunities to connect and share with each other and with other practitioners from the Culture Collective network—including a guided tour of Govanhill Baths’ work and communities in Glasgow, as part of COP26, and participation in Culture Collective’s first in-person event, ACT: Environment and Climate.
In February 2023, six further CULTIVATE Creative Practitioners were announced and resourced with 10 month freelance contracts responding to commissions to collaborate with specific marginalised communities.
In Dundee, creative practitioners Vinishri Verma, Amadu Khan and Shona Inatimi were commissioned to work with people of diverse ethnic backgrounds, connecting with existing community groups and encouraging the amplification of their unique voices and stories. Creative workshops built conversations around the intersection of science and art and the value of storytelling, with their work culminating in a showcase event exploring themes from climate change awareness and greenwashing, to how we talk about climate through a cultural lens.
Working with young adults in rural Perthshire, artist Jaz Grady developed Project Echo to help empower young people to express their ideas and contribute to positive environmental change. Young artists were invited to join the group for creative workshops, open days and events, bringing together a broad range of work into a final exhibition engaging with the artistic and societal dialogues that mattered to them most.
In Forfar, Creative Practitioner Angela Gillies collaborated with people living on low incomes, offering an opportunity to make their stories heard on the impacts of climate change and the daily pressures they face – from food instability to the lack of public transport.
The commissions also included the role of CULTIVATE Storyteller, offering Creative Practitioner Lu Kemp the unique opportunity to observe and engage with each CULTIVATE project, documenting and celebrating the stories revealed across each of the communities involved. You can read more about Lu’s experience in this blog and we look forward to sharing her final films soon.
Opportunities for peer-learning remained an integral part of the commissions and with the support of learning partner tialt, the Creative Practitioners engaged in several reflection sessions, and participated in group trips to the Scottish Crannog Centre, Findhorn Bay Arts’ Combine to Create: Learning Exchange, and a three-day residential with Culture Collective.
Read more about both rounds of Creative Practitioner commissions in two reflective blogs from our Creative Climate Producer, Claire Dufour: Creativity Makes Change Possible and Unlocking Imagination and Agency through Creativity.
Alongside developing partnerships through our Creative Practitioner commissions, CULTIVATE has enabled us to expand and strengthen relationships across the Tay region and in different sectors through piloting projects, collaborating on events, and knowledge sharing.
Community engagement across the project has evolved through many forms and shapes – always collaborative, open and generative:
Beyond the work outlined above, CULTIVATE’s highly collaborative approaches have been acknowledged alongside fellow third sector climate groups in Dundee by committees and policymakers, included in reports by the Climate Change Committee and Scottish Parliament’s Net Zero Committee.
Within a creative economy context, CULTIVATE was highlighted in the UK’s Creative Industries Sector Vision 2023 paper, under “Goal 3: Wider Impact of the Creative Industries”, Circular Communities & Creative Scotland report: “Circular Economy in the Creative Industries” and in Culture Collective’s: “Our Voices: A Diverse Artists Guide”, highlighted as an example of good everyday practice.
Creative Dundee is committed to ensuring that Creative Practitioners and Communities are resourced and supported to bring their strengths and skills to complexity. As an organisation which is always in the process of expanding our understanding, we have learned a great deal from CULTIVATE and are now applying the practices across our work, and as part of an innovative community-led project, Dundee Changemakers Hub from 2024 onwards.
CULTIVATE’s typographic identity was the first creative commission and embodied our themes of community, creativity and climate. Thoughtfully designed by designer artist/musician, Tommy Perman, it is based on the shapes of support structures that are used across the Tay region’s landscape. Tommy created a visual framework with the generous idea that local illustrators could then be commissioned to playfully interpret the distinctive identity as the project grew.
We invited Cara Rooney, Mairi Isla, Evie Grace Caldwell, Jon Bishop, Lucy Steel and Chloe Gardiner to respond to our CULTIVATE identity and with this initial co-design tone set, the direction of our community engagement also evolved through many forms and shapes, always collaborative, open and generative.
These supports are used in our farms, gardens and green spaces to encourage growth and they seemed like a fitting visual metaphor for the project’s identity. It’s been designed to be reimagined, inviting illustrators to embellish and evolve it with their own ideas.
Tommy Perman, artist, designer and musician, based in Perth and Kinross
“From the snapshot the CCC saw in just a few visits, it is evident that an enormous amount of community-based activity is underway, some publicised and supported by local authorities, but much more is taking place independently… These groups need to be supported and encouraged because they generate the success stories, inspiration and positivity that can instigate and maintain support for climate action. The CCC heard that their experiences should feed into climate policy and reciprocally, climate policy should facilitate community-based practical projects.
Community projects are not an alternative to large-scale investment in infrastructure, housing retrofit and public transport, but should be viewed as complementary.”
Extract from the UK Climate Change Committee’s Climate Conversation Report (page 18), in reference to CULTIVATE, as a result of Creative Dundee co-hosting their visit to Dundee in April 2022.
“In Dundee, we had a presentation from, and discussion with, representatives of diverse group of community bodies taking part in the city’s – and the wider areas – journey to net zero. The discussion touched on the role of art, active, travel, recycling, nature and other matters. It was an important reminder of two matters:
Most community groups working in the broad area of ‘net zero’ are in practice making a two-for-one contribution: they are delivering carbon savings as an additional benefit of projects about food, money-saving, cycling, community cohesion, mental or physical health, etc. In so doing, they can generate the success stories, inspiration and positivity that can instigate and maintain support for climate action.
Small-scale net zero-themed community projects will never be an alternative to the large-scale investment and intervention we need to decarbonise housing, energy or public transport, but they are complementary to it. They humanise the overall journey to net zero and secure public buy-in. In that respect, they are equally necessary.”
Extract from the Scottish Parliament’s Net Zero, Energy and Transport Committee’s first report: The role of local government and its cross-sectoral partners in financing and delivering a net-zero Scotland (SP Paper 302) as a result of Creative Dundee co-hosting their visit to Dundee in September 2022.
Creative Dundee centres creative practitioners and communities as powerful catalysts for collective good. We facilitate collaboration, nurture collective leadership and support people to imagine and act together to benefit our communities and place.
Working collaboratively with partners across the city, region, country and beyond is at the heart of how we develop projects in and outside of the creative industries. We are also committed to creating a culture where equality, diversity and inclusion are prioritised and promoted across everything we do.
Culture Collective is a network of participatory arts projects across Scotland, shaped by local communities alongside artists and creative organisations. Funded by the Scottish Government through Creative Scotland.
