UK Creative Community Fellowship

Arts and culture can be a powerful force for positive community change. That’s why creative people who are called to strengthen their communities need to be supported.

Driving transformation through arts and culture can be daunting, difficult and often lonely. UK Creative Community Fellows brings cultural trailblazers together to be part of something bigger, to learn life-changing skills, and to see dreams become reality.

UK Creative Community Fellows is the result of a longstanding partnership between Derby Museums and NAS, a United States-based organisation that builds and supports diverse communities of cultural leaders, and the Center for Social Impact Strategy at the University of Pennsylvania. The programme’s faculty and facilitators are drawn from all three institutions.

This programme is an online and in-person learning experience from October 2020 to January 2021 which joins artists, community organisers, administrators and entrepreneurs from around the United Kingdom to explore new tools and frameworks which will assist their arts and culture projects in driving transformational change. The journey begins with nine days of living and learning alongside one another at an incubator-like environment in Yorkshire, continues with four months of focused online learning modules, and concludes with a trip to the United States to meet a broader international cohort of Creative Community Fellows and other trailblazers at a NAS event (NAS programme fee, lodging, and airfare are covered as part of your fellowship).

Leaders thrive when they understand and connect with their communities. They partner with other local organisations and take part in civic initiatives. Most importantly, they listen to community members. This kind of connectivity and relevance is the key to driving a physical or social transformation through the arts.