Sankofa: Go back and fetch it

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I’ve evaluated programmes of work in the creative and cultural sectors for almost 20 years. Many have had a strong community engagement ethos.

Organisations seek to demonstrate that an anticipated number of people engaged in a programme of work and that they achieved anticipated outcomes (which may be many and varied).

The evaluation challenge is to develop tools which support the accurate measurement of those outcomes, ensuring they can be reasonably attributed to the creative intervention. I argue that if that is all we do as evaluators we run the risk of learning the price of everything and the value of nothing.

Art is more interesting and potentially transformational than that. As part of the evaluation process, I often ask what people know now that they didn’t know before participating in a programme of work. When we ask artists, producers, participants, audiences how something felt; why they continued to participate; what they got out of it, we become much better able to convincingly specify the unique and sometimes unexpected impacts of arts and creativity.

For this piece, I turn the camera on myself to share some of what I know now that I didn’t know before I began conducting evaluations in the UK creative and cultural sector.

What are communities?

Communities are not instrumentalised pockets of people whose function is to yield outputs. They do not exist simply to be reached out to. Communities are made up of individual human beings who may appear similar on the outside but bring their own thoughts, feelings and ambitions to creative programmes.

Connections with communities should be freely entered into and should be mutually beneficial. Socially engaged arts – valuable as it is – is not a as effective as a well-funded NHS or education system at improving health and learning outcomes. People do not necessarily engage with creativity because it’s good for them. They engage for their own reasons. We find out what these are by asking them.

Sankofa

Recently I was asked to document the story of a new piece of work by artist, Larry Achiampong, commissioned by Heart of Glass in St Helens. It explored themes of respect, protection, power, dominance, empathy, connection and community.

In the course of our conversations, we kept returning to the idea of Sankofa – a Ghanaian concept that is central to Larry’s practice. It can be translated as ‘go back and fetch it’ and refers to the necessity to learn from the past and to take that learning into future practice.