Developing a Civic Leadership Role

LARC’s civic leadership work will focus on three core activities: delivery of an advocacy campaign to promote the role of culture within regeneration; a research programme to support the campaign; and work to help deliver continuous professional development across the cultural sector.

Advocacy campaign
LARC’s Thrive advocacy campaign will focus on promoting the public value and impact of the cultural sector on Merseyside. It includes a high level annual seminar led by an international speaker and is targeted at leading figures from the public , community, business and faith sectors in the city region. The campaign is also building a new dialogue between cultural organisations and higher education institutions and with the health sector, aiming to establish joint planning mechanisms and secure the funds needed to test out new ways of working together.

Research Programme
The research programme gives the campaign a solid evidential base and also aims to build research capacity in the cultural sector. The programme is supported through a research partnership with Impacts 08 – the Liverpool University/LJMU research programme set up to establish the social, economic and cultural impact of Liverpool’s Capital of Culture year. Our work will include the collection of key statistics about the LARC partners; mapping activities to chart the engagement of cultural organisations with other sectors such as health or higher education; and a series of research projects to look at the intrinsic (i.e. emotional and intellectual), social and economic impact of culture.

Continuous professional development (CPD)
LARC is developing a strategic approach to tackling a range of CPD issues across the city’s cultural sector – from programmes at entry level to address the lack of diversity in the workplace to support for emerging leaders and senior management.

Organisational development
Part of the work of Thrive is to develop LARC as a consortium, creating and supporting a series of working groups and regular network meetings at different levels in the organisations. We will also be considering how we can develop shared services both between LARC partners and more widely in the cultural sector.