Creatives Now
Creatives Now is an arts collective for 12 - 18 year olds in Bolton, led by its members with support from Bolton at Home and Bolton School as part of Bolton's Cultural Education Partnership. The collective is made up of children from five of the town’s secondary schools as well as children wo are home schooled.
The collective welcomes new members who are interested in working collaboratively to bring youth voice and creative projects to the local arts and culture scene at regular intervals across the year. The outfit has a town centre studio where they meet on Saturday afternoons. The group also meets online to interview creatives from across the UK and beyond as a careers and skills initiative. Young people must live in Bolton and/or go to school in Bolton to join the collective and/or to contribute to the magazine.
The Creatives Now magazine, launched in January 2023, is a forum for young people in Bolton who wish to report on local arts and culture events, find out about the town's cultural vision for 2030, write opinion pieces on current cultural issues and interview homegrown and international creatives about their work.
The magazine features visual work and creative writing from the town's young creatives alongside opinion pieces from Bolton's teachers and cultural leaders.
Background
The pilot project for Creatives Now was led by the School’s Director of Creative Learning and Partnerships in partnership with Manchester International Festival in 2019/20 as part of Curious Minds’ SLiCE (Specialist Leaders in Cultural Education) project.
Resources
Staff time/cost of staff time, expertise and release from school and/or use of staffs’ own time is required to participate in the range of activities listed. Extensive facilitation, project and event management skills are provided by staff to develop and augment each of the projects mentioned.
The project was initially funded by Public Health and also draws from the Bolton Fund. The group bid for and received money from Bolton’s Queen’s Jubilee fund in 2022.
Impact
The focus of first phase of Creatives Now was to capture the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic and ascertain what the challenges and positive outcomes have been faced by this group, and how this can inform recovery, using the concepts of place, space and wellbeing.
Project leads developed a Project Proposal in the form of a creative research project, incorporating principles of co-design and co-production. The project drew out concepts such as the impact on mental head space, working in a digital space, engaging in virtual space, the importance of physical/community spaces and the impact of sharing intergenerational family spaces.
The creative research output has been fed into ongoing recovery plans in Bolton, informing the wider Vision partnership’s schemes of work for this community.
The collective is made up of children from five of the town’s secondary schools as well as children wo are home schooled. Characteristics of the group include a range of additional learning support needs, e.g. poor working memory, ADHD, ASD, dyspraxia and Able Gifted & Talented traits. The group includes young people who report with anxiety, as introvert (including selective mutism), experiencing social exclusion in a school context and who identify as LGBTQ+.
The collective have hosted an open studio event and Crompton Place shopping centre takeover, curated two town-wide schools open arts exhibitions, represented youth arts at a Town Hall Youth World Mental Health Day event and represented the strength of youth arts in Bolton at the Town Hall reception for the 2023 Royal Visit. The collective advertised for, interviewed and engaged three local artists to work with them on projects that creatively investigate locality in the period Autumn 2022 – Spring 2023. They have produced their own product range featuring positive mental health messaging.
Pupil Involvement
12 - 18 year olds of all genders who live in Bolton and/or go to school in Bolton.
Frequency
Weekly in term time.