The Culture Strategy - A Year On

Introduction

Following a citywide consultation with Sheffield’s creative community, the city launched its Culture Strategy at an event on 11th December 2024. We are now one year into this decade-long plan to support arts and culture in Sheffield, and so much has been achieved already.

We established ‘Culture Sheffield’ at the City Council to help deliver the Strategy alongside the people of this city. Our first year has been about tackling Ignite, the Strategy’s first creative mission which lays the foundations for the next 10 years of development.

We are pleased to say that almost all the actions in Ignite have already been achieved, and we’ll break them down in this article.

Communications

The Strategy called for better communication in the sector and more knowledge sharing, so we set up new channels to signpost creatives to the tools and resources they need to thrive:

Our comms are about championing creativity, upskilling the sector, keeping people in the loop about Strategy delivery, and bringing culture more readily into the city brand. They are also about creating greater platforming, support and celebration of diverse cultural events across communities. This will impact the people of Sheffield and the visitor economy, placing the Sheffield culture scene on the national stage.

Strategy activation series

The Strategy activation series was a great success last spring. The series was put together to ‘activate’ key conversations about different areas of the Strategy, and it was fantastic to see so many people contributing their ideas.

Culture Sheffield collaborated with numerous organisations and freelancers to put on the series, and it revolved round themes such as grassroots music, sustainability and sector leadership. The events engaged over 750 attendees!

Selected achievements and positive outcomes:

Feedback:

Alongside our activation series in spring, we commissioned RivelinCo to run a 9-part Freelancer Skills Series which reached 190 people. They covered topics such as event production, fundraising and creative facilitation whilst also offering freelancers and small organisations a great opportunity to network and share ideas.

From the feedback, we can see that people really valued the chance to connect and share information with each other:

To build on this, we tendered again for another Freelancer Skills Series, and it was awarded to Fair Collective who have been delivering workshops in the second half of 2025 and will be doing so until early 2026.

This is a programme for creative freelancers and small creative organisations in Sheffield, designed to help them build practical skills, grow their network and explore new opportunities across the city’s cultural and visitor economy. Themes have included how to decolonise your practice and future-proof your creative career.

Looking ahead to 2026, sign up to learn how to turn your idea into an event and get training on how to improve your creative facilitation skills. Find out more and sign up to the events here.

We continue to support freelancers in our everyday work through our communications channels and are committed to having conversations with creatives who reach out for support. We have also included attendance payments for some of our events to encourage freelancer participation, and there is a high proportion of freelancers in the Culture Strategy Action Group.

The Culture Strategy Action Group

At the heart of the Culture Strategy is a commitment to shared leadership and a collaborative, city-wide approach to shaping Sheffield’s cultural future. With this in mind, we co-created a collaborative leadership model called the Culture Strategy Action Group (CSAG) alongside the sector.

We had an astonishing 75 applicants to this group, which was whittled down to 17 members with difficulty! Membership will rotate to keep ideas fresh and ensure broad representation.

The CSAG brings together a cross-section of passionate cultural workers in an ongoing task group to drive positive change across the sector by connecting people, championing ideas, and inspiring collective action.

The CSAG is in its early stages, and so far it has had two meetings with a full day planned for January. We’ll be adding details about these meeting to our website.

Sector networking

As promised in the Strategy, we began our quarterly sector meetups with Culture Club. Each event has sold over 100 tickets and takes place in one of the city’s valued cultural spaces, with the Alder Bar, Persistence Works and CADS all playing host so far.

We’ve had electric performances from Sound Café, Danaé Wellington, Resonant Bodies and several other great local acts. Culture Club is essential networking and collaboration time for the sector, and our call-out/shout-out walls are a great way for people to platform their work and share knowledge.

Other events

Our events support the development of training and toolkits at different levels, from early career professionals to established practitioners:

Bridging the Gap

This is a targeted support programme designed to strengthen events-based cultural organisations that have the potential to become sustainable but are currently operating without stable core income.

The fund was open to Sheffield-based cultural organisations that need development to become more financially secure. Its main objectives are:

The fund has now closed and been awarded to 5 Sheffield orgs, who will receive a tailored business support package that includes ongoing mentoring, structured workshops that are bespoke to individual training needs, and grant funding of £10,000.

The funded organisations are:

Watch this space to see how the fund develops and how these organisations are supported!

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Cultural Networks Fund

We’re also delighted to announce the launch of the a £20,000 grant programme designed to strengthen Sheffield’s cultural networks.

Cultural networks bring together artists, organisations, and communities around shared aims. When supported, they can become powerful “engine rooms” for collaboration, a reflection of Sheffield’s cooperative spirit and a key driver of the city’s Culture Strategy.

This fund recognises that many networks are already achieving great things but often face challenges in time, resources, and coordination. This fund will help existing cultural networks strengthen their structure, plan sustainably and deliver public-facing cultural activity.

Networks can be awarded:

Applications are now live, so please share!

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Cultural Pipeline Fund and Creative Communities Fund Evaluation

We finished evaluating and reporting on pre-Strategy funding schemes including the Creative Communities Fund and Cultural Pipeline Fund (CPF). These show what great impact funding can have in the city:

Other successes

Amidst bigger projects and achievements, we are committed to supporting the cultural and creative industries in our day-to-day work. This includes advocating for cultural organisations who are submitting bids, meeting with creatives to hear about their work and offer support, and platforming other teams at the council. This enables organisations and creatives to access support in the local authority that they otherwise wouldn’t have heard about.

What's on the horizon?

Here's a glimpse of our 2026 events schedule:

We will also be hiring a Development Manager in our team to deliver on the city’s ambitious plans for Heritage – if you think this could be you, check out the spec and apply here!

We are beginning to move into the next creative mission of the Strategy, Accelerate. This involves improving young people’s access to the arts, championing the social benefits of culture and working towards an environmentally sustainable sector. These are more challenging thematic issues for the Sheffield sector to tackle together. Keep an eye on our comms to follow progress and get involved.

Closing thoughts

Hopefully these projects from our first year have gone some way towards challenging the problems that artists and organisations face. However, ultimately, the city is in the early days of the delivering of the Culture Strategy, and there is a lot more to be achieved. It is still a challenging climate for cultural organisations and creative freelancers, and the above successes don’t negate the struggle the arts sector is still going through.

Thank you to all the organisations and creatives who have been involved in the delivery of the Culture Strategy this past year, whether it was to deliver an event, develop your cultural network or something as simple as submitting an opportunity to our channels. You’ve all been part of the journey, and more exciting things are coming – watch this space!