Five ways Arts Award can support arts and cultural organisations

Moderator and Senior Trainer, Judy McFall reflects on five key ways that Arts Award can support arts and cultural organisations to develop their offer:

• Develop partnerships
  Have you thought about reaching the wider community and schools? Arts and cultural organisations can use Arts Award as a ‘hook’ to establish partnership working across cultural and education sectors. Making links and working with other settings can pool expertise, develop CPD opportunities for practitioners and teachers, share resources and work collaboratively with young people.

• Audience development
  Delivering multiple levels of Arts Award across your organisation can widen your offer as it provides a framework for you to attract new audiences and bring in a wider variety of groups. It can increase visitor numbers through your door, engaging with a diverse mix of children, young people and their families or wider networks.

• Sustain practice
  Building new relationships with schools or community groups not only increases your delivery and audiences but it can support sustained practice. By engaging with a breadth of facilitators you can pool resources and share expertise, ensuring achievable and sustainable delivery with professional practitioners.

• Boost credibility
  Offering Arts Award can provide credibility to your activity and offer a framework which supports new skills development for young people including team work, communication skills, creative thinking and problem solving. Arts Awards achieved can contribute to your activity's outputs and justify budget spend, plus it provides an opportunity to celebrate your achievements!

• Broaden your reach
  Perhaps you are looking to offer higher levels within Arts Award in order to work with older young people or targeted groups. If you work across more than one level of Arts Award it can support transitional group working, mixing audiences and sharing practice. For example, higher levels (such as Silver or Gold) could contribute to your younger working groups (such as Discover or Explore) and develop transitional programmes. A young person doing their Silver Unit 2, could deliver workshops to younger groups, providing the opportunity for the juniors to access creative workshops and experiences from a senior young person who is developing Silver leadership skills.

Interested in finding out more ways that running Arts Award can benefit arts and cultural organisations? Judy will be presenting two free webinars in March. Join her at one or both:

• Embedding and progressing Arts Award - Tuesday 13 March, 11am
• Developing sustainable school partnerships with Arts Award - Tuesday 20 March, 2pm