What does your organisation do?

We take a community-first approach to culture, using creativity and collaboration to support underrepresented and underserved people and places.  Our aim is to nurture confidence, advocacy and the practical skills needed to lead, grow, and transform local neighbourhoods; with culture and community voice always central to the approach.

 

Our home is Plymouth, where we develop and test our models of best practice, but we work across the UK and internationally to amplify community voices in the cultural sector.

Through this, we create an understanding and appetite for the role culture can play in improving people’s lives and their futures.

We take the applied learning we develop on the ground and with communities and evaluate it well so we understand it and we can share it. To local authorities, cultural institutions, VCSEs, and educational institutions/schools – so they can learn about how to use creativity to engage and support communities to have more in a time of less.

What need or societal problem does the organisation’s work address?

We address inequality through creativity and culture. 

We work with those people/communities that have been historically and systemically underserved.  We take a community-first approach to the work we do – so all our projects and programmes are wanted and needed by those we collaborate with. 

We work shoulder to shoulder with communities. Writing funding applications together, setting local strategies together, creating project briefs and managing budgets together, evaluating and marketing work together. 

 What this does ultimately, is scaffolds the skills of cultural production directly into the communities we work with, so they have the ambition and the know-how to keep going and create their own change beyond the lifespan of projects. 

It also teaches us what communities want and need, so we can support others to work better with local communities in collaborative relationships that create long-term change.

What impact does the organisation’s work have?

Since 2009, Take A Part has worked to:

Raise over £6 million for underserved communities across the UK and internationally, creating new employment pathways into the creative industries for 60+ people from non-traditional pathways.

Developed 10 community social enterprises and 7 unincorporated groups, demonstrating sustainability of our work.

Formulated a proven and grassroots cultural democracy model of practice, that has been embedded in organisations such as Royal Academy of Dance, Birmingham Museums Trust and University of Gloucestershire.

Demonstrated tangible improvements in education, health, antisocial behaviour and employment, tracked through changes to local Indices of Deprivation, Ofsted Reports and Crime Statistics etc.

Established robust national and international networks that have influenced policy and shifted how institutions work with communities (Arts Council Ireland, Canal & Rivers Trust, Local Trust etc).

Our work has been case studied and researched by leading bodies such as Arts Council England, Centre for Cultural Value, Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation etc).

We have a network of international practice that includes Ireland, Japan, Malaysia and India – supporting global learning and application of SEA and community-first practices to expand and strengthen through shared learning.

We established and run the UK’s only international biennial symposium dedicated to Socally Engaged Arts practice – Social Making. 

What are the organisation’s current fundraising priorities?

Since the COVID pandemic, the ensuing cost of living and environmental crises and the subsequent rise of nationalism, we have seen an increased demand across the cultural sector, funders and investors in communities and communities themselves to work more creatively to support cohesion, understanding and locally led change.

This has meant that the demand for our work is high. To be able to respond to this demand and give underserved and underrepresented communities the very best.

We are seeking a core investment to:

  • Support Take A Part’s national programme of work including Ocean Cultures (climate/ocean justice), Civic Space (youth-led placemaking), and Social Learnings (skills development).
  • Embed our learning infrastructure (toolkits, reports, symposia, digital resources) to equip other communities, artists, and organisations to adopt SEA methodologies.
  • Increase our capacity to deliver leadership, training, and consultancy nationally to organisations, local authorities, and funders committed to meaningful community engagement and cultural equity.
  • Support the growth of a national commissioning network through Circles of Practice, enabling diverse and ambitious community-led projects across multiple regions.
  • Invest in our people and partnerships so we can deepen our expertise, widen our reach, and continue to lead the field of socially engaged practice.

 

What are the organisation’s future ambitions?

We want to see a more applied and expanded SEA sector collaborating across the creative industries and cultural sector – this is our goal.

Creative approaches to community-building work are needed in our world now more than ever.  As a UK leading organisation in SEA practices, we want to see community-first approaches applied as widely as possible.  A world of more generous institutions (cultural, educational, civic and community-serving) that spend time deeply working with those that have the least to create better futures for all.

What we want to do is step into a more nationally (and internationally facing) leadership role. Where we work to create more networked and nationally reaching approaches to devolving the practice of creative placemaking and decolonising and demystifying culture.

We want to advocate, through research and evidence, the impact of SEA practice at a national level and use that evidence to call for policy and investment that supports the development and application of SEA.

We want to challenge how SEA is practiced, by creating larger and more nationally developed SEA commissions around new and urgent issues in our society (nationalism, AI etc). So we can learn from applied practice.

We want to invest more in our Social Making learning arm – through expanding Social Making, developing regional conferences and spaces to explore practice, developing online learning and more opportunities to share the practice.  Not only ours, but everyone’s.