Creative Black Country and reflections on working during Lockdown

A piece by Luke Perry for his Corridor of Colour project for Creative Connections - an outdoor exhibition of his neighbours designs and words made in to bunting

Marketing and Content Manager Kerry O’Coy looks back at the past six months to highlight some of the key outcomes the team have learnt from.

It’s strange to think back to the start of the year when our main concerns were which venues could we host community engagement events and when best to schedule them for maximum take-up (remember those days before the words ’social distancing’ became part of our everyday vocabulary).

We’d been planning our expansion into the new CPP area of Dudley (we already cover Sandwell, Walsall and Wolverhampton and now the final piece of the Black Country was complete) and the team had been busy meeting people and chatting through ideas over countless cups of coffee at meetings in cafes.

There had been tentative first steps with a partnership project with Multistory when in February Dutch photographer Rob Hornstra and writer/filmmaker Arnold van Bruggen visited Dudley to start their research for The Europeans.

Life as we knew it was fairly normal.

The blog posts read ‘Postponed’ and not ‘Cancelled’ - we weren’t quite ready for a 4 month lockdown

And then things changed.

Looking back through our Blog posts, I read about events we were doing: A Rough Guide to CPP’s, a few Creative Communities meet-ups, a design jam with CoLab Dudley, get-togethers, talks. It was a busy time for Creative Black Country. 

Then the news of an imminent lockdown came and so we started to stamp ‘postponed’ (cancelled seemed too definite and non of us knew quite how long this was going to go on for) on all of our events; it was time for some positive and decisive action.

How could we support our already stretched and precarious culture sector in the Black Country? How could we support freelancers and artists whose work had now been cancelled? And how could we do all of this strategically with our partners and stakeholders?

Zoom meetings took over from face-to-face meetings as the team struggled with tech issues and broadband drop out (thank goodness for new laptops and tablets that had been ordered at the start of 2020) and the continuous ‘you’re on mute’ shouts began to make us giggle (you’ve all played Zoom bingo by now). But a plan emerged and took hold.

Re-directing resources 

One of the key ideas was to redirect resources from an existing strand, and so ‘Creative Connections’ was launched. Where we would usually encourage communities to come together to co-design projects this was no longer an option. As lockdown restrictions and shielding came into being we put the challenge out to communities, artists and creatives to come up with new project ideas and creative responses on how to work with people during social distancing. 

What could people do to bring fun, joy and creativity to local people in the Black Country, and keep people connected? 

The response was great and one of our biggest to date. With the help of a community panel 20 projects were commissioned in total across the Black Country (each receiving between £500 and £2000).

10 Yards Away and 100 Years Ago - Creative Connections commissioned project

The projects were varied in theme, art form, and style and included: Creative projects and craft kits sent direct to people’s doors; football fans who were invited to chronicle West Bromwich Albion’s League championship-winning season of 1919/20; writers and poets were asked to submit projects for online gatherings; people could learn hip-hop dance moves; fairytales were re-written and retold by households; artwork was hung across streets; shielding individuals were asked to film memories of their NHS correspondence, and much more.

All forms of social media, video conferencing, texting, and messaging were utilised as were more traditional forms of communication, and even covert doorstep package drops.

People were asked to photograph, film, write, draw, colour, share. Some of the commissions went smoothly and others came with challenges and four months later, at the end of July, we hosted a get-together of our commissioned projects to find out what they had learnt.

Learning from the projects

CHALLENGES WITH PARTICIPATION

Even with lots of community outreach experience, some project leads found it was challenging to get people involved or to commit. Those participants that were initially enthusiastic sometimes just ‘dropped off the radar’. 

There was a general worry or concern about not pushing people too much to get involved in projects in case their personal circumstances had changed. It was acknowledged that people could have more personal issues to deal with around health, wellbeing, family, job security and money due to the pandemic.

Those that started projects later on into lockdown came to realise that people’s commitments changed with individuals going back to work halfway through the project (from having nothing to do to suddenly being very busy).

WORKING WITH TECH

Feedback from purely digital projects threw up a range of challenges. A few project leads commented that although people wanted to get involved it isn’t as easy digitally as people may be shy due to the overall interaction being different and not as natural as in real life. 

There was also a realisation that people are not always so keen to ‘share’ their work or videos of themselves on social media.

The need to ‘let go of perfection’ or an idea of how artists ‘thought things should look' was also acknowledged. For those asking participants to make videos, the different tech used (e.g., different smartphones) and how the quality of filming turned out, meant that those editing had a set of challenges that they hadn’t anticipated (mixed quality of filming, a strange angle or the wrong orientation for example).

POSITIVE OUTCOMES

As well as some of the difficulties that come up in all kinds of projects there were a few key positive surprises that people weren’t expecting. The fact that it has helped some people and teams develop new skills in working digitally and the idea of agile working was one.

How great it was to get to know, meet and reach new people that they might not of if circumstances were different was also a key positive to many of the projects. Where numbers of participation have always been a factor for projects this was switched to quality of experience and interaction (over quantity of people).

Lots of the projects leads have also decided to continue and expand their projects beyond the initial commission period. From real-life exhibitions in the future to the continuation of online writing groups and workshops via zoom.

Not all the projects have finished yet so we don’t have all the feedback from participants or the data and numbers, but the initial delve into the early outcomes have been generally positive and encouraging.

And what about our learning?

It has continued to be a very busy time at CBC. Zoom fatigue set in quickly at the start of lockdown but for the team, communication was always key. I’d say we seem to know more about what is happening with each other's projects than we ever did before. Somehow the team, and projects, seem closer although very much physically further apart.

We actively took part in learning. Half of the team undertook a course in Human Centered Design which we have used to develop a new project called 20x20 with the aim to grow creative confidence and share inspiration of potential participants in our new expanded area of Dudley.

There was also a key realisation that we needed to think more carefully about how we make our work and projects more accessible and so we have been undergoing training with DASH (Disability Arts Shropshire) to learn more with weekly workshops.

We learnt that having online access to all our files in one place is really useful (thanks to Microsoft 365 and Teams) when you can’t get into the office. Having shared files in one place may seem obvious to some but for those of us that rarely spend time in the office, it’s great to help track information and not have to ask our duo of admin ninjas to help out all the time.

We will continue to learn how we adjust our practice to fit the new world we’re living in, particularly around digital working, and we hope that our experiences will have a longer-term positive impact on our work as we’ve discovered new ways to reach more people differently.

Like our participants, we also learnt that you can’t foresee how a project might turn out. No matter what insight and experience you have. Sometimes you just have to let go of preconceived ideas and just remember; what will be will be.