July 2017 – June 2018: A Year In Review
After a beautiful summer we’re now fully charged and ready for the coming year, so we thought it would be nice to pause and reflect upon the last year of activities before we dive into our autumn programme!
In July 2017 we launched phase 2 of the programme, with associated funding from the National Lottery through Arts Council England’s Creative People and Places programme. We had big ambitious plans to build upon the activity we had delivered since our creation in 2014, looking at creating new, inspiring and fun arts experiences for the whole of Corby Borough.
In the year that followed we have celebrated local heroes in our Living Legends exhibition, joined thousands of women across the UK in Processions to celebrate the centenary of the women’s vote, raved with small people and their families at our first Big Fish Little Fish Family Rave and brought walking trees and a giant robot to the town’s annual Bonfire Night celebrations. Overall, we have delivered over 500 hours of arts activity, achieving over 35,000 engagements in high-quality arts experiences.
And those figures don’t include our first annual outdoor arts festival, Grow, which took place across Corby town centre in July and engaged over 12,000 audience members over the weekend!
Alongside our larger activities, we’ve also been working hard to make sure that everyone in Corby has the opportunity to contribute to the programme; from conversations at community groups to decision-making panels full of local people programming and commissioning artists alongside our staff team and our new Community Gatherings, one-off events to explore a specific area of arts activity. And over 70 local people have volunteered over 300 hours of their own time to help make the programme happen and gained valuable new skills in the process.
We’ve also worked to support the local arts sector through all of our activity. Across the programme, around 43% of paid artist opportunities were awarded to Corby-based artists and we remain committed to commissioning artists through open call-outs whenever possible to maintain equality of opportunity. Through our new Cultivate programme, we have delivered over 70 hours of training, mentoring and networking opportunities to those working to connect high-quality arts activities to our local communities. This has already resulted in over £120,000 of new funding for arts activities coming into the borough and has supported fantastic events such as Corby Mardi Gras, Corby Big Film Week and Corby Totems.
We’re looking forward to sharing with you all that the next year of our programme has to offer; from art at the cutting-edge of digital technology to arts activities located across the community and of course, the next edition of the Grow festival!
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