How can young people unlock London's cultural opportunities?

As A New Direction prepares to become the London’s leading ‘Bridge’ organisation for arts, culture, young people and education in April 2012, we want to hear your views on how young people can unlock London’s cultural opportunities.

Holly Donagh, A New Direction's Partnerships Director outlines our plans for conversation with the sector:

A New Direction finished 2011 at Sadler’s Wells for the fourth of our focus group sessions with arts organisations. We had invited organisations that are part of the Arts Council’s National Portfolio (and in receipt of funding specifically for work with children and young people) to come and talk to us about their challenges and experiences of working in an education or young person’s context and to give us a steer on where the London ‘Bridge’ organisation could add real value.

We are currently bringing the results of these sessions together but the discussion touched on:

• how best to communicate with schools
• how the sector could collaborate more effectively
• and our collective responsibility to listen to young people and advocate for the broader value of the arts and culture in their lives.

National Portfolio Organisations

The next stage of our information gathering will start to show who is doing what and where, and to identify where organisations could potentially share and collaborate.

In the next few weeks we will be writing to Arts Council National Portfolio organisations in London, asking them to give us a bit more detail on their ‘offer’ to young people so that we can form a clearer picture of who is doing what in London.

This will help us start to identify gaps and challenges, it will also start to build a picture of where there are particular strengths. We were very struck by the willingness of the organisations we spoke-to to exchange skills and share  expertise as part of an ecology of organisations.

The wider sector

We are very aware that the Arts Council funded part of the sector is only one bit of London’s rich cultural landscape. We also want to hear from individual artists, youth groups as well as cultural and heritage bodies and libraries, and will be setting up opportunities to speak to some of these constituencies over the next few months.

Give your views online

There is an survey on our web site for anyone who is interested to post feedback to us.

Young People's views

The opinion of young people can easily get lost in debates about what will ‘help’ young people. We held an initial focus group with a small number of young people before Christmas and we are looking at mechanisms for making sure we are constantly capturing the views of young people and engaging them in our own decision making.

In many ways young people are at the sharp-end of a lot of current policy change – from shifts in the management of schools, loss of the Education Maintenance Allowance and tuition fees to the removal of the ring-fence around local authority spending on Sure Start, youth services and careers advice. It will be interesting to see - as 2012 progresses - what impact this has on engagement in culture and to what extent the sector is able to respond.

Find out more about our role as lead 'Bridge' organsiation for London