Arts Council England Yorkshire has commissioned Eventus to create an advocacy programme for Sheffield's Creative Places. The programme will include a Flickr site documenting artwork from Creative Places projects across the city, a visioning document and a conference organised jointly with New Start Magazine. The date for the conference (and your diary!) is Wednesday 15 September 2010.

Confirmed speakers include:
Richard Russell - Director, Strategic Partnerships Arts Council England
David Barrie - Urban Renewal and Real Estate Creative and producer of Channel 4’s Castleford Project
Emily Miller – Director, Meanwhile Project
Sam Thompson – Researcher and Consultant, Centre for Well Being, New Economics Foundation

Our commissions for 2 artists for the Look at Me! Images of Women and Ageing  research project with the University of Sheffield produced a fantastic response from all over the country. The selection panel, which included staff and participants from Guildford Grange Extra Care Housing Scheme in Norfolk Park and volunteers from Green Estate Manor Lodge, chose Monica Fernandez and Laura Pannack respectively. Monica and Laura worked with the women in March and April. Monica and Laura worked with the women in March and April. Project participants from Guildford Grange were presented with a framed copy of their favourite photograph, a cd of images and a certificate at the opening of a small exhibition of photographs from the project. Participants from Manor Lodge will be receiving framed pictures, cd's and certificates at the opening of their exhibition at the end of July. The main exhibition, which will also include images from workshops held by Rosy Martin and Prof Susan Hogan, will open on the centenary of International Women’s Day in 2011. 

The project website is now live at http://www.representing-ageing.com/. If you think there aren’t many images for an image based project, this is deliberate! Creating the images was phase 1 of the research, phase 2 will focus on people’s responses to the images, which will be collected and collated by the research team.  As one of the reasons for the success of the funding from the Economic and Social Research Council was because of the cross disciplinary nature of the arts and academic methods, it has been fascinating from both sides to explore and contrast different ways of working and to have participatory arts methodologies reflected on by academics.

In May this year community venues and shops around Killamarsh hosted a photography exhibition close to the community’s heart. The exhibition, called 'Little Treasures, Celebrating Killamarsh Women', was the culmination of an audience research project targeting women aged between 45 – 60 who do not normally take part in arts activities.

Photographer Pam Gill worked with project participants at a domestic level, at times and places appropriate for them. The women developed their photographic and digital imaging skills and produced a body of work based around the families and homes they love. Although the learning was private, the final exhibition was very public. The exhibition grew out of discussion with and the agreement of the women themselves, who selected the final images for display.

Partly because Killamarsh has no venue suitable for an exhibition and also because we wanted to embed the results of the project into everyday lives, we created a community exhibition of 27 individual panels which were displayed in Killamarsh Library, the local medical practice, a sports centre, a clinic, Ark Vet’s Surgery and an empty shop in Bridge St. The launch was held at St Giles Church coffee morning with cakes from the WI. Both St Giles Church and the local WI played a major role in publicising the project and all leads and contacts have been passed to NE Derbyshire Arts Development Officer for future work.

‘Little Treasures’ was created and delivered by Eventus for Cultivate EM on behalf of Derbyshire Arts Partnership Group (funded by Derbyshire County Council and Arts Council England).

Eventus was again successful in acting as the lead managing agents for the South Yorkshire Arts consortium in securing £209,197K funding from Kids Can Do in 2009/10. This enabled partners to deliver over 600 sessions of arts activities for over 10,000 8-13 year olds in Sheffield.
In the first half of this year Eventus has secured an additional £100K of funding, enabling partners to deliver even more arts activities across the city. To view the full programme of arts activities taking place this summer holiday visit the Kids Can Do programme at http://www.asksid.net/
Kids Can Do funding is government money which councils can now opt to un-ringfence and use for other purposes. We hope to be able to extend the contract and continue activities for the second half of this year.

Passers by in Broomhall this May were seeing double when a large model of Broomhall Community Centre started appearing on street corners. The model was part of a consultation process created by Eventus to help the Centre understand the needs of non-users in the community. Eventus staff and facilitators toured the mobile centre to different parts of the area at different times of day - evenings, weekdays and weekends - to capture as diverse a sample of local residents as possible. We soon realised, given the timing, that it was important to open the conversations with "it’s nothing to do with the election" and people were then very responsive and happy to share their thoughts on the Centre. Further elements of the consultation include a survey of existing users and a photographic ‘diary’ of centre activities. These activities will help the centre manager to create a new business plan that better reflects the needs of the community. 

The membership prospectus for VIVA was launched in February and the Board now meets regularly to review membership applications. As many arts organisations nationally start to look to commissioning as a new way of working, there has been considerable interest in the consortium model, particularly in view of the track record of the founding partners in developing the consortium over the past 2.5 years and with Eventus delivering  the Kids Can Do contract as lead managing agent. 
Funding from the Modernisation Fund enabled us to employ SCEDU as consultants to explore the business case for Eventus in relation to the consortium development, and we are grateful to them for valuable research and recommendations.

After 7 years with Eventus, Company Manager Cath Brown has left to take some time out to reflect on what she wants to do next. Staff, board and partners would like to say thank you to Cath for all her hard work for the company.
We welcome Janet Rodgers as Administrator and Monitoring Officer. Janet has a wealth of experience in regeneration and will be reviewing all our systems and processes to make sure we’re efficient and effective for the uncertain times we are all facing. Fiona Oliver has been busy creating the image bank for Creative Places and will work freelance for a further 3 months on refreshing our marketing. We hope to have 2 further appointments to announce in the next newsletter.

Clare has been busy facilitating workshops with artists, voluntary arts organisations, parish councillors and council staff in Shropshire as part of creating the county’s new arts strategy. A series of group conversations has created a very live process, where the ideas from one group can be fed into and reflected on by the next. This process will continue over the summer, after which draft recommendations will go out for public consultation.

Following our creative consultation day with residents, staff and neighbours at their hostel for homeless young people, Broadacres Housing Association in North Yorkshire has commissioned us to create their first arts strategy.  We’re looking forward to meeting the different groups of staff and residents and finding ways of increasing their opportunities for creativity.

Congratulations to the hard working team at St Andrews Church, Epworth, who have just been awarded over £450K by the Heritage Lottery Fund towards further restoration work and consolidating the church as a centre for the community. This is the second organisation mentored by Clare on behalf of HLF to have been successful and we wish them every success with the project. Clare is currently acting as mentor and monitor on 2 further HLF projects in Lancashire and Lincolnshire and enjoying exploring community engagement in so many different contexts.