‘BE IT’ funded! Our new leadership programme
We have been successful in our bid for Arts Council Transforming Leadership funding to pilot a brand-new leadership programme, BE IT.
We’ve always been vocal about our desire to transform the culture in the arts sector. We’re desperate for it to become more inclusive, accessible and beneficial for all and Rising exists to support this change. We believe that young people are leaders NOW, not in the future, and all they need are opportunities to lead.
Rising’s programmes aimed at the city’s cultural institutions – namely OnBoard and Open-Up – seek to interrogate the face of decision-making in the city by bringing young people in as consultants, infiltrating the cultural sector both top-down and bottom-up. When we saw the Arts Council’s call for applications for their new Transforming Leadership Fund we knew this was a real chance for us to continue to shift the conversations around leadership in the sector.
When developing our application and the thinking behind this programme we decided to host a Leadership Lab with our community of young creatives asking them what they would want and need from a leadership programme. The Lab involved sharing ideas, playing games and eating food while interrogating powerful provocations about what it means to be a leader.
What do we think of when we hear the term ‘leader’?
Who are the influential leaders in the city?
What are the leaders of today missing?
The Lab confirmed a lot of things for us. Leaders need opportunities to experiment, to fail and to share their learning. When asked ‘Who are the influential leaders in the city?’ all the young people pointed to their peers seated around the table. It therefore became imperative that we developed a programme that focused on nurturing these existing, unrecognised young leaders in the city – one that would give them opportunities to lead, share their thoughts with the sector and really start to shake things up.
Cue BE IT, our radical new leadership programme that we hope will empower a community of young leaders and embed young people at every level of the city’s cultural sector. Out of almost 200 applications submitted to the Arts Council nationally 18 programmes have been funded, ours to the tune of £215K! The funding will directly support twenty young people aged 18-30 in their leadership journeys over the next two years, providing high quality training, industry professional mentoring, work placements and a budget to programme events sharing their learning. Another twenty will benefit indirectly through shadowing and peer mentoring opportunities. We will use radical models of personal and professional leadership development, such a Reverse Mentoring, alongside co-leading sector placements, giving young people the opportunity to challenge the structures within the creative sector that continue to exclude them.
This is a really exciting time for us. We are now recruiting a Creative Producer to lead the BE IT programme and will be recruiting the first cohort of leaders next month. The first round of our 12 month programme will launch in January 2020 delivered in partnership with Bristol City Council’s Culture Team and The Mayor’s Office.
Stay tuned and look for callouts and developments over the next few months.