Our charity started in 2008 – and since then, we’ve worked on heaps of projects, collaborated with loads of brilliant organisations, and supported thousands of children and young people to access inspiring creative and cultural opportunities.
The Mighty Creatives team is incredibly proud of the work we have achieved over the past 10 years as the ACE Bridge organisation for the East Midlands. Since 2018 (to July 2022), this has included:
For 10 years, we supported schools and education settings on their Artsmark journey and helped young people to achieve their Arts Award qualifications. Throughout this time, we built many trusted relationships with the education sector, including primaries, secondaries, alternative provisions, SEND, pupil referral units, colleges, plus other fantastic youth settings and inspiring cultural organisations. Artsmark is the only creative quality standard for schools and education settings, accredited by Arts Council England, and Arts Award is designed to inspire young people to grow their arts and leadership talents.
We worked closely with a range of cultural organisations and schools to develop Local Cultural Education Partnerships (LCEPs), a response to Arts Council England’s Cultural Education Challenge. We supported 9 Local Cultural Education Partnerships, invested £1m in partnerships across the East Midlands between 2008-2022, and supported young people to develop their own creative projects in the community through our Youth Empowerment Fund.
We kickstarted the DWP’s Kickstart Scheme as a Gateway organisation. Through this £2 billion fund, we connected employers with young people aged 16-24 – those most at-risk young people on Universal Credit. This offered 6-month work placements to prevent them from falling into long-term unemployment.
The perceptions of what children and young people with learning disabilities can achieve artistically are quite often limited by ill-informed beliefs, so we did something about that in the East Midlands. We shook up the region up with Splash! – a participatory arts programme held around the waterways of the region, led by Diverse City with the UK’s professional integrated circus company Extraordinary Bodies. We made waves for better inclusion and representation for arts organisations, schools, businesses, and families across the region.
We were part of a European group of partners from across Bulgaria, Spain and Italy; together, we sought to understand the impact of the pandemic on education and on the experiences, wellbeing, and health of students, teachers and parents.
Funded by Erasmus+ | 2020-1-UK01-KA201-079148
The DiARC project combined the experience, resources, and expertise of four partners representing four countries in Western and South-Eastern Europe (United Kingdom and Belgium, Bulgaria and Slovenia respectively). The project’s acronym “DiARC” represents Digitalisation, Art, Resilience, and Creativity, the principles that underpin its mission: to build the resilience of young people and art communities to the negative financial consequences of the Covid-19 pandemic.
We were a partner organisation for The World Reimagined (TWR), a ground-breaking arts education project responding to the theme Still We Rise. We fought to transform how we understood the Transatlantic Trade in Enslaved Africans and its recurrent impact on all of us. During Black History Month, our staff team took part in the Mighty (UN)Mute (a day-long vow of silence) to raise £5,000 for TWR. We gave up our voices to raise awareness of the importance of young people’s voices – especially those who identify as part of the Global Majority (previously referred to as BAME). We couldn’t communicate with others throughout the day verbally, by text or email, written notes, or posting on social media.
Our Changemakers programme helped young people to develop their creative skills and influence change within the education and cultural sector. ‘Creating the Future’ ran in June 2019 at the Curve Theatre in Leicester – attracting delegates from across the education, arts and cultural sectors. The passion and work ethic of our young people involved allowed for a thought-provoking and insightful programme for these industry members to enjoy. It also offered young people experience within the creative sector but not strictly related to their prior work.
Funding from Esmée Fairburn Foundation 2015-2018 supported Act 4 Change, a 3 year programme of training, brokerage and support for young people and locally-based partner organisations to tackle social issues using creativity and creative skills to lead change through social action projects. The focus of our work and social action activity over the lifetime of the programme supported delivery in locations, and with groups, where arts and cultural engagement is low – and where social issues, such as isolation, poverty, low attainment in education, and high levels of unemployment are seen. These factors often related to global issues like homelessness and migration, as well as location-specific issues relating to priority groups (Looked after children, Refugees) and services that meet their needs.
