Covid-19 CARE project launch – Our first workshop with partners

We are delighted to say that our project has been formally launched! At the beginning of February 2021, we held a workshop with partners and beneficiaries which served as a perfect opportunity to talk about the work that the team has done so far and share some of our preliminary findings with arts and cultural organisations in Liverpool City Region.

The project team were joined by partners from The Reader, Choir With No Name, National Museums Liverpool, Bluecoat, Liverpool Philharmonic, Collective Encounters, FACT, as well as members of our advisory board.

We shared some of our preliminary findings from both Survey 1 (involving arts and cultural organisations: museums, theatres, galleries, concert halls, community and participatory arts organisations) and Survey 2 (engaging their audiences/beneficiaries).

The workshop started with an introductory presentation by the PI Professor Josie Billington, welcoming all attendees and outlining the research aims and objectives of the project. This was followed by talks from Dr Joanne Worsley and Dr Megan Watkins, postdoctoral researchers on the project, sharing some of the preliminary findings from the work so far. Finally, the Co-I Dr Katia Balabanova spoke about our next steps and Helen Bryant, the project co-ordinator, introduced our plans for setting up an interactive database aimed at capturing examples of best practice across the sector.

Joanne’s presentation highlighted the creative and collaborative response of the arts and cultural sector in Liverpool City Region to the challenges posed by the pandemic. She stressed the vital link with health and social care services as well as the significance of online provision, while acknowledging that the new ways of working have presented many challenges as well. For more details about our preliminary findings from Survey 1, Wave 1 please read Joanne’s blog – ‘A Lifeline’.  

Megan’s presentation highlighted some of the emerging key findings in relation to why people engage with arts and cultural activity, what barriers they face and the main platforms they use. The survey responses have captured experiences before the lockdown, during the full lockdown in the first half of 2020, as well as during the partial easing in the summer of the same year. The link between accessing arts and culture and individual mental health and well-being was particularly telling. For more on the preliminary findings from Survey 2, Wave 1 please read Megan’s blog – ‘Liverpool: Living in Lockdown'.

The conversations that took place after the presentations highlighted the importance of considering the experiences and mental health of practitioners themselves; the role of accessible technology for socially isolated and disconnected families, choir members, people living with memory loss and dementia, isolated women or women living with life limiting conditions or experiences as well as young people with experience of migration; and the sustainability of alternative models of provision.

Overall, the workshop underlined the value of having a regular forum to share ideas and updates about activities, and to consider future directions for collaborative research. In the coming months, the team will be looking at ways to build this into our timeline and feed into our interactive database of best practice in the Liverpool City Region. Watch this space!

Katia Balabanova, COVID-19 Care Co-I, Reader in Political Communication