Create, Connect and Sustain

This project brings together social enterprises that use creative practice as a way of promoting sustainable soicial development, together with art, design and community researchers.

Working in partnership, we shall design and execute a collaborative research project around a shared set of concerns.

Recognising that creative practitioners are often more comfortable communicating through and around their work than they are using abstract language to discuss research design, we shall be using creative practices as a way of opening up our discussions of the domain, exploring the priorities of the different stakeholders, and developing our detailed research plan.

The immediate beneficiaries of this research will be:
* The professionals (& the academics) involved as partners who will develop skills and knowledge
* The networks within which those partners operate;
* The geographical communities that community partners serve in Leeds and London;

Sharing learning across academic and practice based communities will be integral to the design of the project, and there will be immediate impact of co-developing a shared research practice between the academic researchers and the participating organisations, developing deep connectionsand enhancing the research capacity of all partners. The experience will enable partners to develop their practice as participatory community research professionals and to share that learning with other professionals and organisations in their extensive networks.



In the medium term, (non academic) beneficiaries are likely to be other Social Enterprises, particularly those that are centred around creative practice, but also to others who may be may see the potential to use creative practice as part of their mode of working. Additionally, the novel approach that we are adopting to co-design, co-research and co-production will serve as a model for other Academic / Social Enterprise collaborations enhancing the potential for Arts & Humanities research to contribute to social development.

We will achieve this by disseminating our collaboration model, our reflections and our findings during phase 2 of the project. We will do this by connecting to events and social media used by major Social Enterprise networks e.g.: The School for Social Entrepreneurs, UnLtd, Co-opsUK, the Plunkett Foundation and SocialEnterpriseUK. We will also present findings via groups associated with sustainability issues (e.g. Transition Towns). These routes will provide the opportunity for major impact, given the recognised importance of Social Enterprise in achieving the social transformation that the UK needs, and the strong links from these networks to policy making.


In the long term, this research will ultimately contribute to the nation's health, wealth and culture, and the aims of the Connected Communities programme by:
* Enhancing quality of life, health and creative output through increasing the creative and research capacity of Social Enterprise in general;
* Developing support networks of organisations and professionals around the UK sharing learning and collaborating in co-research and in Creative Social Enterprise;
* Improving the economic competitiveness of two urban centres by stimulating creative and sustainable social enterprise;
* Increasing the effectiveness of public policy through better understanding of the potential of creative social enterprise to engage people in sustainable activities and trade.