Squad Wide Transitional Conversation

Over the past few months, we’ve held four conversations exploring each of the Arts Council’s new Investment Principles. These principles define both their strategy for the arts in England, and the way they make decisions about who they fund. We’re using them to inform The Writing Squad’s plan for 2022/23, and our application for the next round of funding.

The principles are: Ambition and Quality, Dynamism, Environmental Responsibility and Inclusivity and Relevance.

Our conversations involved members of the board, our core team and the Squad at large. We talked about how each principle relates to the Squad – we thought about what we do well, what we could do better and came up with new ideas to shape the Squad’s future.

Stuff like: new commission opportunities, new ways of doing feedback, a new Squad origin story. It was all dead exciting, to be honest.

Since then, we’ve been collating the thinking from these meetings and started to draw up our new plan. It’s go time!

HERE’S WHERE YOU COME IN!

We’re now ready to put the Stuff What We Talked About at these meetings to the Squad At Large. We’re holding a sort of informal Zoom Squad Town Hall, in which we’ll share the outcomes of these meetings and our plans going forward, and you can tell us what you think about them. Simple as that.

TLDR: A space to talk about what the Squad could be, what you want the Squad to be, how we talk about who we are and what we do. You don’t need to know anything about the Arts Council’s principles or funding, but we will send you some light reading about our thoughts and plans before the meeting!