Thinking about applying in the next round of Arts Council England Developing your Creative Practice (DYCP)? This focused workshop was designed to shape your idea and plan a strong and compelling application. Part of Culture Central's Inclusive Network 2025/2026 events programme.

A Creative West Midlands is a data-led initiative developed to better understand the creative engagement of people living in the geographic West Midlands region, and to provide powerful tools to the creative and cultural sectors - as well as to Local Authorities and policy makers - to increase creative opportunities for residents across the region.

This document uses Census 2021 data to provide an overview of the West Midlands cultural workforce. This regional overview has been undertaken to support the development of a workforce strategy for the cultural sector.

Radical Listening Week 2025 focused on shaping the framework for a Charter for Equity, a shared commitment to long-term change across the region’s cultural sector.

Culture Central and the West Midlands Cultural Compacts network commissioned City-REDI at the University of Birmingham to understand the state of public investment in the West Midlands cultural sector. This enquiry maps the regional trends in public investment in culture and demonstrates how this investment drives wider growth for the region.

Co-created by over 125 leaders from the region’s cultural sector, Collectively Strategising Culture outlines our priorities and ambitions as a sector in the West Midlands. This plan has been designed to create a shared sense of direction, purpose and responsibility to ourselves and our stakeholders.

In 2023-25, WMCRU meeting explored key strategic challenges and opportunities that affect the sector and the region. The sessions were aimed at those leading strategic activity in their organisations or networks.

Opening Up Access is a gathering together of all the learning that Open Theatre facilitated over a period of two years as part of Culture Central’s Culture Volunteer West Midlands programme.

This 2024 report evaluates the outcomes of Volunteer Futures West Midlands, a two-year project which aimed to expand cultural volunteering opportunities to underserved and excluded groups. The evaluation brings together insights from project delivery partners, cultural organisations, and volunteers.

This evaluation report presents key findings and learning from the Get Creative Programme's five Knowledge Exchange sessions, held between October and December 2024. Commissioned by Culture Central, the evaluation assesses the programme’s impact in fostering collaboration, knowledge sharing and capacity building.

Radical Listening Week saw us partner with More Than A Moment to host a series of lunchtime sessions with representatives from the: South Asian, LQBTQIA+, D/deaf, disabled and neurodivergent, working class and Black creative workforces, discussing their lived experience of navigating the culture sector and the key factors that are barriers to that group's success.

The More Than A Moment pledge is the West Midlands Arts sector’s promise to take radical, bold and immediate action, to dismantle the systems that have for too long kept Black artists and creatives from achieving their potential in the arts and cultural industries.

For four years, Transforming Narratives supported cultural and creative exchange between artists, creative practitioners and organisations in Birmingham, Pakistan and Bangladesh.

This report was commissioned by Culture Central to analyse the effectiveness of the Creative City Grants legacy phase following the Birmingham 2022 Commonwealth Games.

This report, researched and written by FRY Creative Consulting (FRY), represents 6-months collaborating with and working alongside Birmingham Festival 23 (Festival 23) to map out, measure and evaluate the impact of the official one-year anniversary festival of the Birmingham 2022 Commonwealth Games.

Convene, Challenge, Connect was an accessible and imaginative sector development programme, delivered for the Birmingham 2022 Festival.

West Midlands Combined Authority and a range of cultural stakeholders including Culture Central worked together on a cross-regional cultural research project. Its purpose was to find out more about the arts and cultural sector across the West Midlands Combined Authority geography.

We Made That mapped more than 2000 physical spaces that together form the West Midlands’ cultural and creative infrastructure. The result is the first-ever interactive map of the cultural and creative ecosystem in the region, helping a variety of cultural and public organisations guide their planning and attract investment.

This report, written by Culture Central and commissioned by the Greater Birmingham & Solihull Local Enterprise Partnership (GBSLEP), recommends an approach to cultural investments and prioritisation for GBSLEP, which is also applicable to many other LEPs and public funders across the UK.

The aims of this 2021 Coventry University research project were to ascertain what creative freelancers in the region want from a Birmingham 2022 Festival Sector Development Programme, and what would make a beneficial and realistic Programme.

This 2016 Enquiry was a response to a period of intense change in the cultural sector and in the city generally. It sought to balance the ambitions of the sector, in line with the wider ambitions of the city, at a time when there were significant pressures on traditional forms of funding and investment.