As two and a half years of Culture Collective delivery come to an end, the 26 projects that made up this first Culture Collective cohort are winding up. Many of them will find ways to continue in some form – through the ongoing work of the organisations that led projects, through the skill and network of the artists that worked on them, and through the new connections and capacities of the communities that participated. For many of the 500+ practitioners who’ve been involved across Scotland, the past 30 months will go on to influence our lives and our practice for the long term.

For us as a Programme Lead team, though, October 2023 marks the end of our time with Culture Collective. We’re handing management of the programme back to Creative Scotland, with the hope that means can be found before too long to continue the work that’s been begun by this initial cohort. The joy and pride in what we’ve collectively accomplished across this period is accompanied by no small measure of frustration at the lack of a secure long-term future for investment in community-led participatory arts. As such, we close here with an extract from the speech we made at the Culture Collective Celebration, held in Edinburgh last month to mark the culmination of this work.

Today has been a microcosm of everything we’ve loved about Culture Collective over the past two and a half years. We’ve watched connections being made and strengthened, we’ve celebrated the creative talents of artists and communities in their glorious diversity, and we’ve taken time to share, reflect, learn and grow. Culture Collective has been the most incredible, amazing adventure, and we want to mark this moment by thanking each of you – creative practitioners, coordinators, organisational leads, funders, champions, friends, for making this incredible network all that it has become.

Culture Collective wasn’t just an investment; it was a commitment, a commitment to creative freelancers working in participatory settings, and the communities in which they work. This commitment, alongside the time, energy, talent and care of the network, has enabled us to create a working environment we’ve coined as “how we would like it to be” – a place where people are paid fairly for their work, where there is time to build relationships based on a strong foundation of trust and mutual respect, and which holds people firmly at its centre. Together we have built a huge network of hundreds of creative practitioners and those working in participatory practice, one that centres our communities and which makes an invaluable contribution to Scotland’s cultural sector. That’s something we should all be proud of, celebrating (as we are today), and investing in in the long term.

So tonight marks a moment, a pause for celebration and acknowledgement of the road we’ve travelled together over the past 2.5 years. The road ahead, for many of us, is uncertain, and over the last week or so we’ve come to see even more vividly the precarious future for the arts in Scotland. For many of us, Culture Collective has been the most significant experiment we’ve been part of in the arts. Experiments are great to test new ideas, to respond to new situations, and to break the mould of how things are usually done. But when they work – and Culture Collective has worked, is working – we need to move from experimentation to longer term thinking. Tonight is, therefore, also our opportunity to make our plea for the future of the creative sector, for creative freelancers, and for the role of community-led creative practice.

We’ve heard, repeatedly, about the positive impact of creative practice in our lives and in our communities. We all want to live in places that are friendly, connected, vibrant. We want all kinds of people and all of Scotland’s communities to be able to see themselves reflected in our cultural provision, and for artists to be able to make a fair living working within our creative sector. This aspiration requires long-term thinking, and more long-term commitments, to make it happen. Without that, we risk losing not only what we’ve built here, but also the wider creative ecosystem of which this work is (and should be) an integral part.

This is it. This – right here – is the creative sector that Scotland deserves. We’ve built it, and it’s glorious. Please look after it.