On Monday 25 April, more than 60 CEOs from arts centres across the UK will gather for a meeting at Rich Mix in London.

This will be the second event organised under the Future Arts Centres banner. Where the first event in 2014 brought leaders together to identify the challenges and opportunities for arts centres, this event asks how we can work together in new ways to achieve our aims. The event is designed to explore collaboration, asking the questions: what does successful collaboration look like, and how could we use it to strengthen the work that we do in our own arts centres, as well as for the wider sector?

We will focus on exploring collaboration around the practical delivery of new ideas and programmes, leadership development, and advocacy. These areas are of particular interest to arts centre leaders, given the breadth of activity delivered, the wide range of skills and knowledge required, and the desire to raise the profile of arts centres and the vital contribution they make, both to their local communities, and the wider cultural landscape.

To stimulate discussions we have invited Pippa Jones from Create Gloucestershire, Katharine Horler from Adviza and Kajal Odedra from change.org to talk about their success in using collaboration to achieve results. The day will also include practical sessions around topics proposed by Future Arts Centre members.

Whilst arts centres share many attributes with other arts organisations, we believe the opportunity for CEOs to meet with other leaders who have so much in common is a rare and valuable one. We hope this event will result in active collaboration between arts centre leaders in the room, whether that’s on a one-to-one, group or wider network basis. It will also inform the future of the Future Arts Centres network itself. We look forward to sharing thoughts and ideas from the event in the coming weeks.

Gavin Barlow & Annabel Turpin
Co-chairs, Future Arts Centres
@gavingjbarlow, @annabelturpin