Courageous change: The decision to end the January Challenge

Earlier this year I announced my intention to stand down as chief executive of 64 Million Artists, the company I co-founded 12 years ago. In the current climate, with grants hard to come by, the board and the team took the decision to close our public programme in order to preserve our creative facilitation and training work and sustain the future of the company.

That means 2026 will mark the final January Challenge, our flagship programme that last year welcomed more than 360,000 participants. Via the theme of ‘courageous change’, we want to use this last opportunity to help individuals, organisations, community groups, schools, health settings, care homes and everyone across the UK to find their creativity in order to make change in our lives and in the world around us.

A personal ambition made public

The January Challenge started as both a personal and a public enquiry. I had reached a point in my life where I felt stuck. As a result, I decided to take a month off work and ask different people I knew to set me a daily creative challenge. It was transformative for how I felt but also opened me up to the many different possibilities around me.

One of my challenges was set by David Micklem, who I had worked with previously at Battersea Arts Centre. He asked me to go on a long walk around London with him, during which we discussed the state of the arts and the need to move from ‘Great Art for Everyone’ (Arts Council England’s strapline at the time) to ‘Great Art By, With and For Everyone’. We had the idea for a campaign in which people rediscovered their own creativity, one designed to reconnect people with a love for art but also adventure, curiosity and compassion.

This enquiry became the vision for 64 Million Artists, and the January Challenge became an annual event, growing exponentially over the years. We worked with artists such as Lemn Sissay, Michael Rosen, Jess Thom, Yomi Adegoke and Alex Wharton, with communities from across the UK, and organisations including Warm Welcome Campaign, Young Minds, Arts and Homelessness International and various NHS Trusts.

Solving problems and reimagining the world

Over the last four years we’ve worked with our research associate, tialt, to better understand the benefits of creativity. Thanks to the January Challenge, we’ve been able to measure how a regular creative practice creates improvement in six key areas of collaboration, ideation, practical skills, connection, mental well-being and joy.

At this moment in time, we could all benefit from enjoying more such values. Creativity exists within all of us and we have free access to it. Reconnecting with it not only helps us feel personally more motivated, more connected and happier, it also helps us solve problems and reimagine the world.

It was a tough decision to make, to close a strand of our work loved by so many people, and to let go of staff that have been a huge part of the making of the company. We didn’t embark on this change lightly, but it’s also something of which, despite the difficulty, I am proud.

The everyday practice of creativity, of listening, of being curious and bold is something that has enabled us throughout the life of the company to pivot quickly, to do so as a team, and to know the right moment to stop. We have navigated this decision with love, care, honesty and a sense of purpose. Endings are not always failures. They are often a brave decision to preserve a legacy of something magical. That’s what I hope we’ve done.

A free ticket to the future

As part of the final legacy of the public programme we’ll be developing a toolkit to support individuals to navigate change, organisations to be courageous in making it, and a creative approach to reimagining systems. We’ll also be hosting workshops to run alongside it, and a final sharing event to celebrate our public programme’s legacy. We haven’t got everything right at 64 Million Artists, but we do think there is a different way of doing things and that’s an ethos we want to share.

The cultural sector is in crisis and having the courage to make change rooted in compassion for ourselves and others is sorely needed. It is hard to think creatively when we are burned out and up against deadlines and tight budgets. But unless we harness our immense collective creativity, we will not be able to turn things around.

Dorothy Parker called creativity a “wild mind and a disciplined eye”. In this current climate we can spend so much time focusing on the disciplined eye we forget to return to the wild mind. This final January Challenge will be a moment to reconnect with your imagination, your hopes and desires, and to open up some joy for one’s self and one’s teams.

We hope by taking part you might be able to make space to imagine things differently, or at the very least have a break from the relentless difficulty of the day-to-day routine. Whether you’re an artistic director, front-of-house worker, finance manager, administrator, freelancer or otherwise, your creativity is your free ticket to the future. Let’s see where it takes you.