Citizens for culture

Despite its power, culture is still too often treated as an optional extra which is bizarre, since we’ve been drawing on walls since day dot. The drive for cultural expression is in our very DNA. Culture is core to our civic and social infrastructure. Yet, it’s increasingly used as a tool to serve other agendas, from stoking identity wars to promoting wellbeing or boosting economic growth.

In Bristol, which is seen by man as cultural city, culture didn’t even make it into the original One City Plan vision for 2050, until cultural leaders pushed for its inclusion. But culture is not a means to an end. Think back to the ancient Greeks and their holistic view of civic life; art was seen as both intrinsic and interconnected to our human essence.

We don’t have to ask for culture. It’s already within us. But to truly democratise culture, we must ensure everyone can participate, not just as audiences, but as creators, decision makers and leaders. That means embedding culture into the building blocks that shape our lives and recognising it as a public good.

Everyday creativity is what makes us human. Culture isn’t just opera or gallery openings, it’s the way we solve problems, tell stories and imagine better futures. We’re all artists and creatives, and that’s where our power and voice come from.

The practice of ‘sortition’

These shared beliefs and frustrations led us to explore creating a model of decision making to shape cultural strategy through a citizen-led approach; a new way of doing things, but also a very old one.

Citizens’ Assemblies draw on the Roman practice of sortition – the random selection of citizens to deliberate and decide on matters of public interest. It’s a model that predates elections and was designed to prevent the concentration of power by ensuring a representative cross-section of society could participate in decision making.

A Citizens’ Assembly is a carefully designed process for enabling people to play an active role in decisions which affect their lives – in this case the role of culture in everyday life. It is a participatory grassroots model for involving citizens in practice and systemic change. It’s about building ongoing relationships so people stay engaged and their ideas carry forward. It’s about deepening the democratic process.

This kind of participatory democracy allows for nuance. It encourages slower thinking, deeper listening and more inclusive decision making. It’s not about winning arguments. It’s about building consensus, a very different model from our current democratic processes. When culture has a seat at those tables, its value becomes clear. By opening up decision making to those too often excluded, we can shift power and ensure that cultural life reflects the full diversity of our society.

Not access but agency

Three key mechanisms make this work possible: voice, resources and pathways. Voice means having your say, knowing your voice is equal to everybody else’s. Resources mean having things at a local level, where people can make and experience culture on their doorstep. And pathways mean providing tangible opportunities, like moving from participation to careers and leadership.

This isn’t just about access, it’s about agency. It’s about recognising that culture is not something done to people, but something we all help to make. And when people are given the tools and trust to shape cultural life, the results are transformative.

And it’s not just out there. Inside our sector too, there’s a growing paralysis. Many in the arts are navigating a heightened sense of operational precarity. There’s a strange kind of equity in that. A shared struggle. One that’s led to some deep, searching conversations; not just about cuts or funding gaps, but about the deeper structural issues that remain, regardless of the resource levels.

Everyday participation

Citizens’ Assemblies offer a model for governing differently; one that values creativity, care and community. They remind us that democracy isn’t just about elections. It’s about everyday participation.

They work using a three-stage process of learning, deliberation and decision-making. In the learning stage, evidence is presented on the topic in hand, the group then discusses this evidence and works together to come to a consensus on recommendations. 

Our idea of a Citizens’ Assembly for Culture was born as a bit of a Trojan horse: not just another consultation, but a way to start a different kind of conversation from a different place.

It isn’t just tacking ‘co-creation’ onto a delivery plan. It’s about beginning from a model that gathers divergent, even opposing, perspectives and using that tension to build a cultural strategy genuinely shaped by the communities it’s meant to serve. Rather than consultation, it’s structural disruption.

Who gets to tell the story?

If we want culture to be taken seriously, we have to show how much it matters. Culture isn’t a side issue. It’s not just for wellbeing, or social cohesion or GDP. It’s essential to our very humanity. We have to ensure from the start that decisions about devolved investment in our region are shaped by those who live and breathe it.

But this isn’t just about funding. It’s about who gets to tell the story, the world we want to leave behind or the kind of ancestors we want to be. We’re doing this to centre new voices, redistribute resources and open up pathways.

Culture is the story of who we are and who we want to become. If we want to change how the story ends, we’ve first got to change how it starts.

To find out how you can help to shape the future of art and culture in the West of England visit the Citizens for Culture website.

Citizens for Culture is supported by the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation (UK Branch) and Paul Hamlyn Foundation.