Funding community art & rethinking the value of arts and culture
In her first piece, Isabelle explored the role of arts and culture in communities. She finished by reflecting on the social value that art can bring to a community, and the importance of articulating that value when we want to attract funding into the arts. But what does ‘social value’ actually look like on the ground?
In her follow-up piece, Isabelle explores this question, starting with a conversation with Jane Crawford, co-founder of Daisy Arts CIC.
Daisy Arts CIC is community-rooted arts organisation dedicated to connecting people through the transformative power of art, using creativity as a catalyst for positive change: supporting wellbeing, building confidence, strengthening communities and enabling people to explore their own stories and capabilities.
For 25 years, they have been working across visual and digital art, music, writing, theatre, film, exhibitions, installations and performance. Their mission is to make high-quality arts and cultural experiences accessible to everyone, regardless of background, ability or circumstance.
Point North has awarded nearly £55,000 in grants to Daisy Arts since 2019. Their most recent award, through the Thriving Together programme, is supporting a community wellbeing project that uses arts and culture as a tool for improving health, reducing isolation and strengthening community resilience in Bishop Auckland.
But what does that kind of impact actually look like?
How community arts can change the way we see where we live
Jane worked with young people on Woodhouse, a post-war council estate built to house residents of former ‘Category D’ villages. She described how negative perceptions of the estate affected the confidence of its young people, with one young person describing it as being “on the outside looking in, and everyone is looking at you.”
Through storytelling, Jane was able to take them on a creative journey towards seeing their community differently.
“They wanted to grow up and have enough money to move away because they didn't like where they lived. As an enabler I was able to take them on that journey through art, through poetry, through photography, then through a documentary, which was intergenerational. So, they met people who lived on the estate, and by the end of it, they said, No, I'm proud of where I live.”
The project changed their relationship with their own place.
Art gave them a means of looking at their community differently, of hearing its stories and telling their own.
Arts, heritage and connecting generations
The same thing happened in a project in Seaham, where Daisy Arts delivered heritage-focused drama workshops. Jane described how the children initially knew almost nothing about the area’s mining history; one child even thought that a lump of coal was “made in a factory.”
Through stories and conversations, the children began talking to their grandparents about their time in the mines, with one subsequently bringing in a miner’s lamp that his grandfather had given him.
“It’s just stories, isn’t it? Just talking. But it’s opening people up.”
What struck me was just how much could happen through something as simple as “just talking.”
And yet, perhaps this is what art does. It creates the conditions for people to talk, remember, participate and see their community in a new light.
The value of art cannot necessarily be reduced to a finished piece, or even the process of making itself, but by what that process makes possible: confidence, connection, pride of place, a sense of belonging.
Why do we need to invest in the arts?
So, what happens if we don’t fund this work?
The stories, legacies and communities it sustains might not be celebrated. Much of a place’s cultural legacy is sustained through grants; and without that investment, we risk losing not only artistic activity, but some of the things that make a place a place.
In reflecting on the link between artistic and social value, I asked Jane what she would do if she had the gift of magic: what would she do for art in the community if she were not restrained by costs or impact targets?
She said she would simply continue doing what she does, just more of it: more promenade theatre, more parades, more “joyous things” that celebrate people and place and give people the opportunity to “get involved and be part of the community.”
This made me think about how we talk about the value of arts and culture, and what we choose to measure.
Is artistic value different from social value?
Only a few metres from the Artist’s Hub, where Daisy Arts is based, is the Miners’ Art Gallery. The gallery features an extensive collection of work by the Pitmen Painters, whose work has significantly influenced perspectives about working-class industrial art.
And yet there is a clear difference in how we think about the cultural activity of the Pitmen Painters and the art initiatives of today, even though both have established pathways for discussion and experimentation.
We make a distinction in our minds between fine art and art for ‘the community.’ But let’s not forget that the Pitmen Painters themselves were supported through working-class education and arts provision like the Workers’ Educational Association and settlement groups.
The heritage we now revere was, in its own time, community art.
I must ask: can artistic value and social value really be separated?
What does Point North’s data tell us about arts funding?
This is particularly relevant when we look at the data. Of the 446 arts and culture grants awarded by Point North since 2021, only 106 applicants selected their project theme as ‘Arts, Culture and Heritage’. More selected Health and Wellbeing. A quarter of projects only qualified as arts funding once I read the spending evidence in the description, rather than from how the grant was classified at application.
Art is clearly funded for what it does to people, not necessarily for what it is.
But perhaps that is not a problem. Perhaps it tells us something about the way that arts and culture operate within communities.
Can art really be separated from its social impact?
It was Jillian Johnston who really expanded my understanding of this. As Transformative Arts Lead at the Auckland Project, working alongside Daisy Arts, much of her role is concerned with engaging local people in fine art, and the more difficult questions that arise from it.
“I actively participate in making or trying to get people to see elitist art differently, and then on the flip side of that, I try and help people understand that their art is, in some sense, no different to the work of elitist art. I see myself and my role as that process of pulling both sides together.”
In practice, the focus is less on the art itself than on encouraging people to look, question, and even criticise the pieces presented to them.
As Jillian explains, when people put forward a “response or even a counter response where they’re saying ‘I really don’t like that’, they are actively enjoying and being transformed in a sense by that experience.”
She tells me that Daisy Arts has helped to foster a community at ease with the arts, culminating in a “bubbling, undercurrent of I can do this.”
This ‘can-do’ attitude is what happens when you invite people into a wider discussion.
Art gives us something to respond to, to question, to make sense of together. Its value lies just as much in the conversation it generates as in the artwork itself.
What does social value then mean in the context of arts and culture?
This brings us back to the question of social value.
Again, it can be tempting to think of social value as something that needs to be demonstrated alongside artistic value: a measurable additional benefit that makes an arts project more worthy of funding. But what if the benefits are not simply just social outcomes of art, but actually intrinsic to what art is?
Although I don’t have a definitive answer, it is questions like these that provide the impetus to looking more closely at what art can do. If we want to understand the value of investing in arts and culture, we need to look beyond what is produced and ask what it makes possible.
And, if we are serious about supporting communities, perhaps art should not be considered an additional tool for achieving that; perhaps it is part of the way communities are built in the first place.
About the writer: Isabelle Owen is a second-year student reading Theology and Religion at Durham University. She recently completed a summer research internship with Point North.
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