Market Place is working across seven market towns with a variety of audiences and partners. Local knowledge and understanding of arts environment in each town is vital to the success of the project. Creative Forums are ‘voices of the community’ telling us, how the programme needs to be shaped in order to “do something new to reach new audiences”.

Who can join the Forums?

• Any individual who is interested in increasing other’s access to creativity, as audience or participants, and accepts the principle that increasing local people’s access to high quality arts activity is beneficial to all, can become a member
• Individual artists and arts organisations are welcome, as are community representatives, audience members and stakeholders

What do Forums do?

Forums work together with the project team to shape Market Place programme, spot opportunities, and design projects along the following three lines:

1. Support community commissioning
The forums will direct and support the commissioning of artistic audience development projects for their own towns and regions that would be proposed by local audiences, partners, or forums members themselves making the best use of their understanding of local needs, capacity and interests.

2. Develop skills as creative producers
Market Place will offer a range of professional development opportunities for the Forum members based on their needs and interests to ensure that by 2017 they are equipped with basic knowledge of arts management, leadership, and creative programming that they can use for future projects.

3. Sustain a productive network
Being a member of the Creative Forum is a chance to network with like-minded people from across seven towns, share ideas, solutions, and resources, develop new partnerships, and have access to exciting opportunities offered through the national Creative People and Places programme. It is also a great change to raise your own profile both locally as well as across the national network.

How does it work?

Creative Forums meet about ten times a year to discuss Market Place on-going development and make recommendations to the Consortium on the way forward. We are supporting the Forums with talks, Go-Sees, training, and peer mentoring to enable them to make informed decisions in line with the fundamental principles of Market Place.

Jenny, Whittlesey: