About Us
“We want to create life-long involvement in the arts by engaging, entertaining and educating people in the Sunderland and South Tyneside.”
What do we do?
We work with the best local, regional and national artists to provide workshops, events and subsidised tickets.
Since we started in 2014, we have worked across 26 ward areas in South Tyneside and Sunderland to engage our community in the arts.
Our aim is to leave a lasting legacy of communities interested in the arts. We want to increase participation in arts and culture, enable more excellent art and creativity, help communities to set up and run sustainable events and workshops independently from us, as well as reflect on and share our learning.
Workshops
Our workshop programme includes activities like ceramics, guitar and ukulele, crafting, drawing, painting, photography, singing, dancing, theatre and more, run by professional artists. We aim to make the activities as accessible as possible, running the programme up to three times a year and using local venues communities are familiar with.
Go and See
Our Go and See programme aims to give people in Sunderland and South Tyneside the chance to experience the best arts and cultural events across the North East and beyond. We regularly advertise reduced or subsidised tickets or trips in our newsletter, which you can subscribe to via this website at the bottom of the page.
Community Boost
Community Boost aims to make an equal amount of funding available across Sunderland and South Tyneside to support existing events, encouraging harder-to-reach people to get involved in festivals and events and taking part in new experiences.
Your Art
Your Art enables us to support community projects to develop and be sustained by providing support of between £400 and £1,000 to community groups to try out and develop their own arts ideas and to support people to shape, lead and programme arts events that they want in their communities. To date we have supported 144 Your Art projects, supporting groups to work with artists, recruit new members and visits to arts experiences. If you’d like more information on how you can secure support for your community project, please do not hesitate to contact us on our dedicated email yourart@theculturalspring.org.uk.
Research and Development
From time to time we are able to offer research and development commissioning opportunities. We offer support for innovative commissions from artists and arts organisations with community engagement as a core part of the idea. We advertise these opportunities through our newsletter and on our website and through our social media channels. Please make sure your signed up to our newsletter to receive this information
Meet the Team
-
Emma Horsman
PROJECT DIRECTOR
-
Emma Scarr
PROJECT COORDINATOR
-
Iam Burn
DATA AND ADMINISTRATION COORDINATOR
-
Rob Lawson
PR AND PUBLICITY ASSOCIATE
-
Claire Finlay
PROJECTS OFFICER
SOUTH TYNESIDE
-
Emma Biggins
COMMUNITY ENGAGEMENT COORDINATOR
-
Megan Disken
PROJECT ASSISTANT
-
Catherine Scott
DEVELOPMENT WORKER (CHARITY)
The Steering Group
The Cultural Spring Steering Group is made up of community champions and representatives from our core partners and provides leadership and governance for the project, overseeing its successful delivery.
Our steering group members are:
Graeme Thompson; University of Sunderland (Chair)
Dianne Hutchinson; University of Sunderland
Ross Millard; Sunderland Music, Arts and Culture (MAC) Trust
Rob Lawson; Sunderland Music, Arts and Culture (MAC) Trust
Professor Yitka Graham; Head of the Helen McArdle Nursing and Care Research Institute, University of Sunderland
Richard Barber; The Cultural Spring Charity
Ian High; The Cultural Spring Charity
Emma Horsman; Project Director
Kati Whiteoak; Community Champion
Sandra Naglis; Community Champion
Diane Gray; Community Champion
Ruth Dewhirst; ACE Relationship Manager
Kumareswaradas Ramanathas (RAM), Young Asian Voices (YAV)
The Cultural Spring Charity
Find out more about The Cultural Spring Charity by clicking the link above.
Evaluation Report
Mid-term Evaluation Report
for The Cultural Spring’s Phase 3 Creative People and Places (CPP) Project
Case Study
Case study: Learning to pivot and finding new ways to engage with communities.
Annual Review
Annual Review of The Cultural Spring’s work for April 2022 to March 2023.
Phase 3 Evaluation
The Cultural Spring’s phase 3 final evaluation infographic.
Evaluation Report
Final evaluation report for The Cultural Spring’s Phase 2 Creative People and Places Project.
Phase 2 Evaluation
The Cultural Spring’s phase 2 final evaluation infographic.
Annual Review
Annual Review of The Cultural Spring’s work for April 2020 to March 2021.
Annual Review
Annual Review of The Cultural Spring’s work for April 2021 to March 2022.
Diversity and Inclusivity
We are already challenging ourselves by examining our policies, our contracts, the ways in which our meetings are held and our behaviours to see where we can improve. We know there are real challenges and these problems are often deep-rooted, but to stay silent and do nothing is to be complicit. We will be part of the solution.
What’s happening behind the scenes?
Our goal is to have more diverse voices across all the opportunities, activities and workshops we deliver. We are developing our understanding about how different groups of people want to interact with our programme and what access requirements we should be putting in place to ensure that everyone who wants to engage with us can.
We are recruiting young people to our steering group to provide new perspectives, and we have made a commitment to including a range of voices and diversity in our decision making panels. Equality and Diversity are an agenda item on every steering group agenda and will continue to be as we change our approach to engage people from diverse backgrounds and strengthen our recruitment process, making it more diverse and inclusive. We monitor the engagement across all demographics to see where we fall short and make sure we continue to do more to be better.