BTS WITH NMN: JESS HUNT, PROGRAMME DIRECTOR
SW: Hey Jess, what are you up to this week?
JH: It’s been a really busy week for culture and for NMN - for me that’s included sitting on a panel reviewing tons of amazing applications for the Cultivate Commissions, spending the day with our partners Into the Light spotlighting culture in the county, taking my family along to check out arguably one of the coolest tents at the Gala [aka the NMN tent] and finalising some exciting future plans.
In between all that I also hosted a Consortium Meeting - the Consortium is a group of organisations that help to manage No More Nowt, steer the programme, check-in on our progress and generally work with me to make sure everything is tip top with our delivery. They met this week as well! I also took part in a Panel as part of our Imagination Symposium about how creativity can be used to catalyse social change which brought Imagination wizard Rob Hopkins to Redhills Miners Hall to time travel to the future - not every week involves time travel!
SW: Can you give us an overview of your role at NMN, for the readers out there?
JH: Programme Director is a lot like being the Captain of a ship - you steward the programme, leading it through whatever kinds of waters and weather happen to face you. My role involves things like formulating the plans for the future, listening to feedback from communities, developing partnerships and networks, supporting the delivery team with everything from creative production to data monitoring, from managing budgets to running events.
There’s a lot of relationship building involved in the work, across all levels of people from commissioners and funders to cultural partners to members of the community.
SW: No More Nowt’s got some really exciting plans ahead, can you tell us about what people can expect from the programme over the next year or two?
JH: Our last phase of work was very much about reinventing ourselves to be a countywide programme, getting to know communities of people and places that we’d never worked with whilst maintaining our footholds in the East which remains the place the programme calls home. The next phase is all about growing and building on that with a really defined set of programmes based on what we learned from the last phase, working across three key themes…
The first, Solid Ground, builds on the roots we’ve long established, growing our Cultural Hubs to more places across County Durham, re-establishing our network of Creative Champions who volunteer to support our programme happening and Place to Be which builds on our longstanding work in Peterlee and Horden as our base.
The second, Owtside the Lines & Redefined, gives space for folks to imagine new projects and redefine County Durham’s place in the world, exploring themes of identity, stories and modern heritage. In here we’ll be working with young people to develop workshops and festivals about their future in the Future is Ours to Create, exploring how growing spaces can build community cohesion, wellbeing and collective power in Radical Acts of Growth, developing new work with sanctuary seekers through County of Sanctuary and exploring the way digital programming can build cultural connections across a huge rural dispersed county with Actual Reality.
And the third, Owt & Abowt, is the entry point for folks to engage with our programme - they might go to experience cultural offers in the region via our Go & See programme or they might experience our dispersed printing presses, lend items from our lending library for their own events or even take part in a Get To Know You residency that gives space for specific communities to work longer term with artists in residence in their place.
SW: You’ve spent over a decade working with the people of County Durham. How does this new phase, coming up over the next few years, use that foundation to take things to the next level?
JH: NMN are always pushing ourselves to test, try and deliver things in new and exciting ways with our communities - some of what we’re doing, even in this phase, has been building for 10+ years. If you look at our Cultural Hubs strand of work we’ve invested in those existing community spaces both in terms of funding but also project time and relationship building in some cases for more than 10 years and amazing things have happened because of it.
If you look at the relationship developed by Blackhall with Durham University which is now onto its third phase of Street based delivery, models that explore how things like Museum collections or space can be connected with communities who don’t typically have access, with Blackhall as a key partner. For some Cultural Hubs it’s about the building of connections and new relationships as much as anything else, ensuring that their community spaces have cultural offers that go beyond what NMN can facilitate.
For other Cultural Hubs the physical fabric of their places has been influenced by their involvement with NMN whether that be artwork, access to equipment, large scale murals and so on. And you can feel that in the fabric of an area, particularly like East Durham where our work has been running for so long - it’s a brighter place with much greater access to culture and we’ve definitely played a big role in making that possible.
SW: Why do you think creativity is so important to the communities of County Durham? How do you think it can be used to generate change for people, tell better stories and create positive narratives about place?
JH: County Durham is a deeply creative place and many of the people here live culturally rich lives but there’s lots of reasons why they might not have access to cultural offers that other people and places do. It’s rurally dispersed, a vast county made up primarily of towns and villages. As a result transport is sometimes a challenge, income levels might mean tickets or materials are inaccessible and so on.
These are also places that are too often portrayed negatively to the outside world, through the media, through news and press and that has a really big impact on how you feel about the place you live in and the people in that place. Culture and creativity have the power to reframe those thoughts, to tell a different story about a place, to physically transform space, to grow different thoughts and feelings of pride or joy or belief in a place that might have previously felt negative.
We know engagement with culture is good for our health, makes us live better lives, shows us greater perspectives and gives access to more opportunities - the people of County Durham deserve to not be left behind by this and deserve the same access as people living in other places and they deserve it to be about their stories, their lives and shaped by them.
SW:What milestones or community moments will tell you that the programme has worked?
JH: A lot of these stories take a long time with our kind of work but we can see them every day - a Go and See where somebody over 75 goes to see ballet for the first time and is deeply moved, a young person who rode in a pushchair 10+ years ago on a Go & See now shaping a festival as a young producer, a cultural hub leader able to travel and appear at conferences being the expert in the room about community engagement.
But ultimately there are small moments as well that really matter. Somebody engaging in a workshop and finding something worthwhile in their day, somebody writing a poem or a song or contributing to a play and then hearing their words turned into art, somebody catching sight of something unusual like a bus stop transformed into a room and that giving them a little joy in their day…these are all moments that happen regularly and show the programme is making an impact, not always at the same level on every person but in some way changing their lives.
SW: After this next phase what would you like audiences to have taken from the programme?
JH: I’d like to think that our programme offers folks a sense of belonging in often turbulent times, a space for those facing the most barriers to engagement to gather and feel powerful - this is something that we can be really good at in County Durham, just look at the Miners Gala, but that can sometimes feel a little lost in the day to day challenges of everyday life.
I would hope that audiences can see themselves in our programme, their stories being told in new and different ways - that they feel brave enough to try something new, to experience ballet or opera in their late 70s or build a festival lineup in their awkward teens.
That’s one of the things that is so unique to the Creative People and Places programme, that ability to test and try and maybe fail fabulously - it allows us as a programme to pass that bravery onto our communities, to give them the space to be bold and do something different without fear of what might happen if it goes wrong. That’s why strands like our Cultural Hubs work so well - because after long enough they totally buy into this ethos and NMN are able to offer them space to do something in their community spaces that the constraints of everyday or of other funders just don’t allow them to.
SW: Can you introduce us to a new programme area for NMN and give us a teaser of what to expect?
JH: Radical Acts of Growth is a programme built with one of our newest Cultural Hubs, Quaking Houses, that seeks to explore how growing, eating and outdoor cultural offerings can create a deeper connection within our communities, including with those who might have made this place their home.
County of Sanctuary is a project exploring how we can shape and grow culture with communities that our programme hasn’t connected with, sanctuary seekers and refugees and asylum seekers and ways in which our bold, brave cultural offer can give space for artists to work with these communities who have made County Durham their home.
The Future is Ours to Create is a project empowering young people to co-create and co-produce exhibition and festival style events that tell their stories now in a place where often our cultural offer focuses on the rich heritage of our place. This is about the heritage of the future, how post-industrial places like ours can tell good stories about the here and now and also imagine a future for their place.
SW: Lovely stuff, cheers Jess.
