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Exploring art as our cultural heritage and social custom. With concepts related to community engagement, and covers topics such as anchor organisations, community art, co-creation, collaboration, cultural democracy, and economic wellbeing. The document emphasises the importance of grassroots movements, holistic approaches, and sustainable practices in fostering community empowerment and social change.

Never ever underestimate the voice of an organised community.

Anchor Organisation

An anchor organisation acts as a hub or resource for people and plays an active role for the wider benefit of their communities.

Hence, they can be talked of as community focused; holistic and multi-purpose; responsive and committed to a particular function. While it is suggested that community-led organisations such as development trusts and community-controlled Housing Associations often fulfil this role, they believe any organisation that is committed to serving a community over the long term can be considered an anchor organisation, often having an important role in facilitating partnerships and providing local leadership, as there are no stereotypical  examples of sustained community empowerment without some such locally embedded organisation.

Artist

According to the dictionary, artists are described as people who create things with imagination and with skill, because in this context - a community focused practice, there is a core belief that we can all practice art, and that art can be a gateway for people to better understand their lives, their sense of place and their rights. We consider an artist to be anyone with a flexible creative discipline used in a variety of situations, processes and actions, in this sense, we do not define the term ‘artist’ solely as a manufacturer of ‘artistic products’, as we broadly view an ‘arts audience’ as a consumer of art and culture.​

Assets

Assets are valuable, and can be tangible or intangible, having economic, social, or environmental value, hence people and communities are rich in assets.

Working in an asset-based way means trusting that the unique mix of strengths within each community can be used to develop solutions best suited to the challenges they face.

Co-Creation

Co-creation encourages people to actively participate in their creative potential and realise their own ability to make change. It is a co-operative process in which people with diverse backgrounds come together and work in a non-hierarchical way to address a common issue, which enables communities to be actively involved in shaping their lives. As such, co-creation shifts the power, resources, and ownership towards the people who it is intended to benefit – the populus, instead of a traditional ‘top down’ approach.

Collaboration

This involves dialogue between two or more parties who work together towards a shared goal. This process can be defined as one that allows those involved to work together in an open, and transparent way, where all engaged are able to shape the direction of the work with equal measure. Which requires an ordinary understanding to work towards a shared vision with each other, where those involved have an equal sense of ownership over the work and activity: They are learning from a creative process together.

Commons

Refers to the assets and property of the people that are held as a collective, that being our shared social and cultural wealth. This can relate to physical spaces, parks, and common grazing land, but can also refer to technology and other open-source concepts for sharing innovation, ideas, and resources. As such this can be what we have ownership of through the state, the national services, and utilities which we are all equally entitled to. This means the ‘common good’ is a reference to the benefits we all feel as members of a given community.

Community

Describing a group of people connected by a shared interest; it could be where they live, an aspect of their identity, or around a shared hobby, because we are all part of the diverse array of community enclaves, as they can offer the promise of belonging and call for us to acknowledge our interdependence.

Community Art

The creation of art for the purposes and standards set together as a community, and whose processes, products and outcomes cannot be known in advance. This is different from ‘participatory’ or ‘socially engaged art’ in that everyone involved has the same rights within the process, because it is people learning to create art together without hierarchy.

Community Cultural Development

A term used in the world over to describe what is often called ‘community art’ in the UK. It is the work of artist-organisers and community collaborators who use creative work to express the identity, concerns, and aspirations of a culture, and is a process that builds individual mastery as well as collective cultural capacity by contributing to positive social change.

Community Planning

Making the best use of the land for housing, business, industrial, agricultural, and recreational services. It is about making places where people want to live, work and play, places which are safe and inviting, which are sustainable by design. Requiring a collaboration between public services and the community involved to build on shared targets and local priorities and ideally is about how public bodies collaborate with local communities to design and deliver a real benefit to people's lives. Using creative methods of engagement can help de-mystify and encourage participation in these processes, which requires a bridge between policy and practice.

Community Wealth Building

An alternative economic model of working that aims to share the power and ownership over our local economies with local people, and redistribute the work and assets widely across communities, it is about creating a fairer and more socially just economy. This could be achieved through local procurement, skills development, shared resources, and innovation, and as part of local development work. This means putting labour before capitol; ensuring assets are broadly held; and that investing happens for the people as well as the place; with remuneration the result and not the primary aim.

Conversational Practice

An ongoing discussion between diverse groups in which ideas are informally exchanged, and in arts work this is an ongoing conversation with local people about the purpose of the shared spaces we live and work in. This is the foundation of a community-led, grassroots, approach to creative working in a community, as by learning to keep the conversation going is the single most important thing of all – for conversation can be an open space of possibility, it is owned by no-one, rather it is stewarded, nurtured and protected by everyone who takes part.

Creative Placemaking

A new term that has not yet developed into a fixed or accepted meaning, rather a creative and grassroots approach to the development of spaces, and community-led planning that allows communities to take a leading role in co-developing better strategies for the place they live. It engages communities at a grassroots level by building on the existing culture, activity, and relationships in each place. It brings people, communities, groups, and organisations, whether they be public bodies or third sector agencies together to support better strategies in our environs.

Creativity

The use of imagination and original thinking to make something new or different and is part of any area of life which can be classed as work or leisure. When we think and act creatively, we are taking a risk by expressing something original – creativity is what allows change to happen.

Culture

Meaning the ideas and practices that are particular to a place or group of people however small or large. These can be the fabric of signs and symbols, language and image, customs and ceremonies, habituations, or hierarchies, which characterise and enable a specific community to form and sustain itself. The Scottish Government defines culture as reflecting the past, challenging the present, and shaping the future.

Cultural Democracy

The concept has a long history emerging from the 1970's although its story goes further back than that, the idea has been coming back into recent use. It is the capacity to participate fully, freely, and equally in the cultural life of the community, to enjoy the arts by creating, publishing, and distributing artistic work. Aiming to challenge hierarchical structures that support and celebrate culture and open the debate over what is and is not of worth.

From a communal perspective this goes further than issues of access and challenges the very structures of decision-making and power in what is presented as the ‘Norm.’ Arguing that people should have more than just cultural outputs, but access to the means of cultural input, and posits the idea that many cultural traditions co-exist in modern society, and that none of these should be allowed to dominate and become an official culture.

Degrowth

Emerging in the 1970’s, it challenges the model of a constantly growing mode of economics and global society and has recently gained momentum as a response to a need for greater sustainability in our practices by responding to the need for climate action. The degrowth movement of activists and researchers advocates that we prioritize social and ecological well-being instead of corporate profits based on over-production and excess consumption. ​It aims for a more sustainable form of economics, one that works to promote our ecological needs as well as our economic ones, by changing our ways of living so radically that any kind of demand means the complete re-imagination of our Society.

Development

Referring to the support offered to social sectors to encourage the best use of existing assets and can be led by the community itself through a process of internal reflection, organisation, and action, as well as external agencies with interventions.

Asset-based development is however built on the belief that communities already have the assets they need to thrive, they might not consciously recognise them, yet developments are forms of collaboration that insist on the participation of local people by defining their own aims and methods, rather than be something that is done to them or without their direction.

Economic Wellbeing

The agenda aims to measure the success of an economy by how well it serves its people and the environment; not just how much money is made from the products that are produced/sold, or jobs created. From this viewpoint, economics is about understanding who gets what, under what conditions and why? It fosters the idea that social and economic measures should be considered together when judging the relative success of a project. Wellbeing economics looks at the deeper impact of policies; the quality of jobs created, the distribution of money and resources, the effect of poverty or inequality in an area, and the effect on the environment through carbon emissions.

Being measured by way of the long-term effects on health and community empowerment and considers the possible displacement of these social issues as developments that lead to gentrification and regeneration. Pushing poorer communities to the outskirts does not have a wider benefit for local people and is always unsuccessful in economic terms.

Grassroots

Working at this level involves community action on local priorities, often relating to work that amplifies a community’s voice, increasing community power, and championing the right of communities to act on issues that affect them. These movements are associated with bottom-up, rather than top-down decision making, and are sometimes considered more natural or spontaneous than more traditional power structures, often being talked about as work and activity coming from and for our communities.

Holistic

This approach involves recognising and respecting the complex relationships that are at play within a system. It celebrates and seeks to support the entire system rather than individual people or groups.

Innovation

The production of current ideas and new activities which can progress thinking across any field – by disrupting the status quo, innovation leads to new ways of working in any world leading entrepreneurial and innovative nation through investing in economic enterprise. As Such, there is a growing understanding of the significant role that creative industries play in local and regional innovation systems.

Inclusion

Means that all people can share in positive outcomes, regardless of their socio-economic status, race, gender, abilities, sexuality, or other characteristics, and in practice means removing the barriers that stop people being able to make the most of opportunities.

Inclusive Growth

A new term that combines prosperity with equality, with the emphasis on equity and fair distribution of economic growth this is a widely supported argument, but in practice the traditional measurements of economic success may not lend themselves well to community-led development.

In practice it is the local methodology for achieving the vision of a society and an economy that does not simply value numbers, but rather supports the economic activity of communities, places, and all the people who live there.

Instrumentalizing Art

This is treating ideas as instruments that function as a guide to action and in relation to politics, it does weaponize ideation to achieve a political goal when an artist, or artists work, is used as a vehicle of propaganda, or to further the political agenda of an organisation, and mask negative effects of activity on a wider community.

Art as instrumentalization, or ‘art-washing’ in relation to placemaking or development work can refer to when artists are brought in to improve the image of a place or space. Because the consequences of not engaging with local communities who have no real power or decision-making can make those communities difficult to live and work in.

Leadership

A process of influencing people to act together towards a shared purpose and is not about someone’s position in a hierarchy. Leadership can often be found in unexpected places and emerge as a project progresses, and confidence grows.

Participation

In its most simple sense, is taking part in something, and can be seen as our most basic individual choice and power to interact with the world and as such is seen as a core principle in the human rights-based approach to making decisions. An example would be community planning and development, where participation requests give local people more power in the decision-making process to make improvements to public services.

Participatory Art

In its broadest sense this is an approach which includes the public participation of creative work, letting them become the editors in some way of their experiences through activity. The term is used expansively and includes the process of making art to eschew varying degrees of ownership to those involved. It can also be used to describe a form of art called performance art, and that involves the audience in creating the experience as well as the co-creation of the work, which can be broadly defined as the shared creative act.

In its deeper sense it is an art form that has two defining characteristics: (1) It involves the creation of art, in any form. (2) That everyone involved in the act is an artist because, an artist is defined by the act of making, hence it demands that we think, feel, talk, and share our ideas with other people.

Permission

In the dictionary this means receiving approval to act but can also be a process rather than just a one-off decision, because it involves people in a framework of ongoing decision-making, in which community-led approaches to regeneration tend to prioritise the permission of local people. These bring the benefits of social cohesion, connection, a greater sense of support, community-esteem, and self-esteem. Hence creative development, and regeneration projects, require the active engagement of local communities for their ongoing consent to make changes.

Place-Based

Ideally referring to the focus of the work and activity that is informed by the place it relates to, meaning these are the outcomes which are specific to that area. An approach which brings together a range of partners and programmes to improve that area, by considering the work to be about locally specific solutions to social challenges. Describing place-based working as: A community of people bound together to change the place in which they live, believing it will improve the physical, social, economic, and environmental issues of poverty and inequality.

​Place-Based Economics

Creating these economies enables regional cohesion by supporting people to design solutions best suited to them rather than a one-size-fits-all model and so requires that all those responsible for providing the services and looking after the assets, work and plan together with local communities to improve the lives of people and support inclusive and sustainable economic growth to create more successful places.

These are local people building on the characteristics of a geographical area by drawing on its unique strengths and assets, and in practice should support the specific needs of the local people over the profit margins of centralised bodies and global corporations.

Place-Making

The concept of developing spaces that work for communities by encouraging connection and creativity, which can be good urban design, in an architectural and planning sense, and can be done with a greater or lesser degree of influence given to local communities of people involved. Having the benefit of a community as the focus of its intentions is questionable though, as it does not offer the necessary safety net to protect them from the negative effects of economic growth and market competition, particularly in large cities.

Regeneration

Developing a local environment including the activities that happen there, to improve the outcomes of the communities that use it. Successful regeneration comes from the unique identity of a place and its people; meaningfully involving those people in planning it; being based on a long-term partnership over many years; and links local assets with wider national agendas.

Regenerative Processes

These are the social and economic practices that restore and replenish natural and human systems, in contrast to extractive processes which use up resources.

Socially Engaged

An arts practice, this term relates to participating in any collective activity which helps bolster the identity and mitigate the challenges of a community but also referred to as social practice or socially engaged art, it is an artform which involves people in communities to debate, collaborate, or interact on a social level. Contemporary art characterises this as artist-led, non-objective encounters, performances, and collaboration with others, and the participation on a social level is a crucial element of this practice.

It is central, with artists actively collaborating with participants in the experience, and with anything physical often holding equal or less importance to the collaborative act. What defines social practice from a wider participatory practice is the later simply requires the collaborative act, whereas the former requires a focus on social issues through that act.

Social Enterprise

Businesses with a social mission, who use their profits for the common good, by having a clear social or environmental mission that is set out in its governing documents. Being independent and earning more than half of their income through trading, which means they are not solely reliant on grants, and are controlled, or owned, in the interests of a social mission. By reinvesting or giving away at least half of their profits and surpluses towards a social purpose, which requires them to be transparent about how they operate and the incumbent social impact they have.

Social Wellbeing

Wellbeing means living well and living well together and encapsulates all the things we need to have a good society now and, in the future, it brings together environmental, social, and democratic outcomes. Meaning the economy and public services should be focused on the goal of helping people, not themselves.

Sustainability

Meeting the needs we have today without compromising our ability to meet the needs we will have tomorrow. In sustainable regeneration however, it means creating communities that are inclusive, diverse, well-serviced and future proofed.

-Created Using References and Quotes along with AI.

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