The Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) has announced that funding is to be made available to establish a collaborative Centre for Cultural Value, to advance understanding of the value of arts and culture in the UK and abroad, looking at the wider impacts of arts and culture can bring.
The Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) writes:
The Arts and Humanities Research Council, part of UK Research and Innovation, has announced new funding for the creation of a collaborative Centre for Cultural Value, the first of its kind in the UK.
The term ‘cultural value’ includes all the societal benefits that arts and culture can bring including impact on the economy, on communities and cities, and impact on health and wellbeing.
The aim of the Centre for Cultural Value will be to advance understanding of the value of arts and culture in the UK and abroad. It will present how this value is being captured and encourage organisations to act on that knowledge. As such, the Centre will function as a custodian and communicator of cultural value in all its guises; it will synthesise existing research and bring together organisations and sectors with an interest in using evidence about cultural value in their work.
The Centre will be funded jointly by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), Paul Hamlyn Foundation (PHF) and Arts Council England, with a major investment of around £2.5 million over five years.
The establishment of the Centre for Cultural Value follows a wide ranging consultation and the conclusions from a newly published report, ‘The Cultural Value Scoping project (PDF, 357KB)’. The project involved consultations with 200 hundred people from the arts and culture sector, funding organisations, the voluntary sector, academia, and policy; it identified that one of the biggest and most pressing challenges in understanding cultural value is creating communities of interest and practice across these sectors. As a result, the report recommends that a new entity – a Collaborative Centre for Cultural Vale – is set up.
Jane Steele, Director, Evidence and Learning, Paul Hamlyn Foundation says, ‘The collaborative approach is a key feature of the proposed centre. It will help to foster networks, communities of interest and greater mutual understanding between people working in different sectors, art forms and academic disciplines. It will develop a programme of events and conversations, encouraging, for example, arts and cultural practitioners to work with academic and non-academic researchers and evaluators to use evidence in their practice and to develop new approaches to evaluation and organisational learning.’
The Centre for Cultural Value and the scoping report both build upon a large body of research undertaken through the AHRC’s Cultural Value Project and accompanying 2016 report, ‘Understanding the Value of Arts and Culture’ which provides the UK’s most in-depth attempt to understand the difference made by arts and culture.
The AHRC’s Head of Creative Arts and Digital Humanities, Paul Meller says, ‘The Cultural Value Project provided a fantastic evidence base for why the arts and culture matter, and how we capture the effects that they have. This collaboration between AHRC, PHF and the Arts Council to establish a new Centre provides an exciting opportunity to take forward that important work.’
Darren Henley, CEO of Arts Council England says, ‘Establishing a Centre for Cultural Value offers a new opportunity to increase our understanding of the contribution of arts and culture on life in the UK. The Centre will help us to examine the impact of artists, arts organisations, museums and libraries on individuals, communities and society as a whole.’
More details on the Centre for Cultural Value can be found via this pre-call funding announcement. Full details of the funding call Centre for Cultural Value will be published on the AHRC website in September 2018. The deadline for applications is expected to be in November 2018.
View an animated video on the value of arts and culture (produced by AHRC) at
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