Understanding and tracking cultural engagement with the Cambridgeshire Culture Card
Michelle Lord, Arts Development Officer at Cambridge City Council, discusses a project aiming to increase cultural engagement by children and young people from low-income or disadvantaged backgrounds. The project also aims to plug gaps in knowledge around the impact of cultural engagement on education, skills and personal development, whilst trying to build bridges between cultural institutions and the local authority as the key data holder.
“There is an emerging data set that says: if somebody increases their active engagement in arts and culture, it’s likely to have a positive knock-on effect in terms of how somebody progresses in their education, it means they’re more likely to continue on to further and higher education and more likely to keep a job. However, one of the issues with this research is that some of the studies that that refers to aren’t necessarily the most robust studies. This is where the Cambridgeshire Culture Card can be something that not only aims to increase engagement, but is also trying to plug all of those gaps in knowledge that we have around the impact of cultural engagement – in a way that is then accessible for organisations to view.”
