Collective - What Comes Next?

A guest blog post by Nikki Riggon

Nikki is a Cultural Leadership Consultant and member of the second Collective cohort.

In 2025, I joined Collective as part of its second cohort, spending a week-long residency building connections, exploring personal and sector change, challenging our ideas about leadership, and considering what enables or prevents people from creating change.

I’ve worked in music and culture for a couple of decades now. I’ve developed programmes, supported artists, built partnerships and created opportunities across the sector. Now, alongside Culture Central, I’m helping to develop the next phase of Collective - a leadership development programme for people traditionally underrepresented in leadership.

For me, that initial residency was an opportunity to step outside the day-to-day of delivering programmes and think more deeply about how change actually happens. It was a chance to spend time with people from across the cultural sector who brought very different experiences, disciplines and perspectives into the room. Having that time to think, listen and question gave me clarity and amplified ideas that I hadn’t necessarily had the space to explore before.

I didn’t leave with all the answers. But I did leave with a greater sense of confidence, recognising that some of my frustrations with the sector weren’t mine alone, that the barriers to progression aren’t always as invisible as we might think, and that there can be something useful in sitting with discomfort rather than immediately trying to resolve it.

A lot has shifted in my career since then. Culture Central has continued to create opportunities for alumni to stay connected to its wider work, and I’ve continued to be part of that, attending events like Murmuration and staying connected to people from across the cohort.

And now I find myself returning to Collective from a very different position - not only as a participant, but as a Cultural Leadership Consultant, helping to shape what comes next.

Since early 2026, I’ve also been working in programme development for a charity whose work is improving the lives of children and young people in some of the most deprived areas of the country through a collective impact approach.

At its simplest, collective impact is about different organisations, sectors and communities working together around a shared problem or ambition, rather than working independently towards their own individual outcomes. It isn’t simply collaboration, and it isn’t about everyone doing the same thing. It’s about understanding what needs to change, agreeing what success looks like, and then understanding what each person, organisation or sector can contribute.

And importantly, it starts with the place and the people who live there, rather than with the organisations themselves.

So imagine where my mind went when Culture Central asked me to think about what we could do with a group of like-minded people, working in the same sector and across the same region…

I don’t think Collective needs to become a structured programme with a fixed set of outcomes. But I do think the collective impact model gives us a useful sense of what might be possible - if you bring together a group of talented people, connect them around a shared ambition, and create the conditions for them to contribute, collaborate and create change together.

There is an enormous pool of talent and expertise across the three cohorts: people working across music, arts and culture, with knowledge spanning creative practice, production, leadership, strategy, education, community work and much more.

The opportunity is to understand what people need individually, where those needs intersect, and where Culture Central can create the conditions for something powerful to happen.

We recently brought together participants from all three Collective cohorts for an alumni reunion. Rather than arriving with a fully formed answer about what the next phase should be, we asked them…

• What do you need now?

• What would make staying connected valuable?

• What could we do together?

• And what could Collective become beyond the programme or network itself?

Over the next few months, we’ll be working with Collective to explore those questions - creating new opportunities, connecting networks and supporting the people within them to keep growing. The real opportunity isn’t simply to build a stronger network, it’s to see what becomes possible when that network starts to act collectively.