Constitution, Europe, External Affairs and Culture Committee Pre-Budget Scrutiny 2025-26

For more than a decade, Creative Stirling has facilitated inclusive, place based creative interventions to inspire people and instigate change.

Since 2018 we have inhabited a creative community venue that is a four storey 1,110 m2 ex-retail unit in a prime location, at the top of Stirling’s High Street. Over five years, we have created a welcoming and attractive space for the charities, groups, and the thriving creative workforce we support. Our busy and inclusive creative space hosts cultural events, exhibitions and artist studios, along with our community tenants, Stirling Community Radio Station and The Kitchen at 44.

We can evidence the demonstrable impact Creative Stirling has on the High Street from which we operate, shaping new community approaches to enterprise, citizenship, and climate challenge through providing creative opportunities informed by working with our communities and brokering partnerships. So far, this has been made possible through a combination of profits from our trading company Made in Stirling CIC (supporting over 100 local artists) and inconsistent small awards of development/project funding. Creative Stirling’s model provides social, economic and cultural value in equal measure for our region and in 2023 was awarded ‘Outstanding Contribution to the City’ at Stirling business awards.

We are successfully achieving our purpose to further arts and learning, sustainably. We are proving that Creativity is a driver for Community Wealth Building and we work to the understanding that creativity and innovation are key to Scotland’s future ambitions for a Wellbeing Economy. Our unique ‘business with purpose’ model is enabling us to achieve our long term vision to increase income for creative workforce along with profits to support access to creative opportunity and cultural lives, especially for young people. All profits from trading are reinvested in our communities (focusing on those least well served) via the outputs of the charity. The way we work is unique and is providing evidence that we are continuing to make significant contribution to a diverse, sustainable, future focused and regenerative creative sector for our city and region.

The charity turnover was £189,629 in 2023, including £132,966 of unrestricted income from Made in Stirling CIC. Gross sales for our trading company this year were £426,783, an increase of 19.3 % on the previous year, with £293,817 going direct to artists. Our trading this year continues to buck the retail trend of being successful but to date has lacked the investment we need to grow and develop our commercial activity, so we can sustain and grow our community outputs that have become a vital part of Stirling's cultural offer.

Excellence and international ambition for Scotland's arts and culture is a vital aim, but only at the centre of a vision that can address the current crisis underpinning the creative sector in Scotland.

The capacity to pursue creative talent/careers has become exclusive, not just in Scotland. Our government must take the opportunity to address this by scrutinising the public bodies and government agencies, not just for arts & culture, but across the board of community/social enterprise, third sector, skills development and heritage as well as Social Investment Scotland and Scottish Enterprise. Compare the amount of funding distributed, to their operational costs.

The monumental money and effort to build the machinery of EDI into application systems is not working. The creative thinking, talent and energy to rebuild our communities is proliferating, innovating and dying on the vine because of diminishing diversity and siloed thinking.

Creative agencies like ours, that are not part of the existing funded arts infrastructure are particularly vulnerable to siloed thinking. With no-where near enough budget, arts and culture organisations have the near impossible task of trying to compete with hardship charities for project funding.

Added to this, struggling Local Authorities/Creative Scotland continue prioritising shoring up arts institutions that are no longer fit for purpose in a changed world. Siloed thinking and the pursuit of unrealistic scale and excellence over need in relation to social, economic and climate impact (in prioritising Internationalism over community) for the vast majority of the third sector/grass roots organisations that support creativity and innovation in context of place and working in successfully in local cross sector contexts, is an urgent and critical problem.

The diversity and proliferation of creative collectives, networks and grass roots organisations that have come into existence in the last decade is a direct result of the disconnect that continues to grow wider polarity in society. These community led groups and small charities cannot compete for Creative Scotland funding with the arts organisations that hold political power, despite our fragile cultural ecosystems being widely understood to be vital to our national economy with regards to 'preventative spend' on health, social services and criminal justice systems.

If you want a Wellbeing Economy, creativity should be seen as a means of working, not an output that is nice to have. In my experience from 20+ years working within the sector (two RFOs and Scottish Screen) and now as a social entrepreneur who has established a new sustainable model of creative organisation, if we provide access for culture to flourish in our communities on terms that work for them - in doing so we will cultivate a meaningful diversity of creative talent to contribute to other areas of the economy and society. Without trial by bureaucracy or squandering unjustifiable amounts of public money, investing in our communities cultural lives in ways that work for them, naturally enable creative and cultural ecosystems that will produce the future global artists and international cultural leaders that Scotland needs and is capable of producing.

There is an urgent need to recognise that:
In many local authorities there is not the necessary expertise to support the arts & culture sector and that many funding initiatives create competition between LAs and institutions in the current arts funding climate.
Recognise that the larger LAs get most of the funding and the disproportionate impact of creative/arts organisations and cultural assets, being at risk of loss or failure in smaller towns and cities beyond central belt.
Recognise a basic level of service and access for the people of Scotland - particularly living in those communities least well served.
Recognise the potential for SME creative organisations to work with Universities and FE institutions to support innovation and opportunity that is disappearing from the schools curriculum and necessary for a skilled and entrepreneurial future workforce.

There is much greater urgency for innovative funding solutions.

Experience of the Covid funding was super efficiently distributed, timely and effective and a transformation from what came before and has since returned.

Creative Stirling applied for Creative Scotland NLEPF in Aug 2023 - in Dec we were notified that despite our application being approved - there was not enough money in the pot which left us financially at risk of immediate insolvency, having anticipated our application being successful, which technically, it was. Ministers contacted on the matter all redirected me back to Creative Scotland, who could not help. Neither could our local authority.

All agencies that I subsequently contacted (CES, SIS First Port and funders Robertson Trust) could provide little support and no financial assistance. Robertson Trust rescheduled our annual award payment which was helpful, but SIS refused a three month holiday of our loan repayment (£600 per month) despite providing a financial recovery plan as requested by CES, who along with CEIS and Firstport, whose offer of competitive small awards or loans did not meet our urgent needs as all options require writing financial plans and proposals with timescales that were too long for the urgency of our need.

I did work with them for three months which had no real result - I intend to return to them in future but on reflection it would have been a much better use of my time to entirely devote it to organising small community fundraising activities and working on developing new trading activities, as this was how we have managed to make ends meet over the subsequent six months.

Creative Stirling has to date, not received Multi-Year Funding from Creative Scotland. I have been invited and have applied for Multi-Year funding this year and await the outcome of their decision in October.

The creative sector is a close community. I work with scores of artists and others who work in culture, heritage and arts all over Scotland. From daily conversations over the course of years, it is my experience and opinion that the latest Multi-Year funding application process has traumatised the sector.

Creative Stirling provides means to earn for makers and artists who would never get onto Creative Scotland's radar. I have seen many creatives try, fail, try, try, fail again and give up. After seven years wait to be able to apply, we too failed to be funded by Creative Scotland (for NLEPF) despite all the evidence that our inclusive 'value creation' model with economic, cultural and social impact is sustainable. Our application was approved, however there was not enough funding to go round and we lost out to political priorities.

Without us and other place based creative ecosystems like ours, the (financially vulnerable) creative collective we have helped to grow and to thrive will cease to exist. If there is 'not enough money to fund' community led, innovative creative organisations and networks, they will cease to exist and the sector will become suddenly and significantly even less diverse. How can this be reconciled with Creative Scotland's strategic policy commitment to EDI?

We are committed to fair work conditions and along with EDI and addressing Climate crisis, these are the SDGs that are the foundations of our business plan for Creative Stirling.

The recent funding decision by Creative Scotland (and two from our Local Authority) in recent months have increased stress on our staff who are paid living wage or above but all of whom deserve industry standard benchmarked rates of pay that without investment, as an arts charity, we cannot currently afford.

We are currently unable to realise our potential while we have no means to invest in our staff. The reality is that working conditions are being eroded for our sector.