Based in Kent, People United are a small participatory arts organisation – a team of five, three of whom work part-time – working with communities across the region (in settings ranging from schools and care homes to parks, museums and beaches), and artists and arts organisations across the country. Founded by Tom Andrews in 2006, but now led by Tina Corri as Chief Executive, it is part of Arts Council England’s National Portfolio, and receives additional funds from Kent County Council, trusts and foundations.

Mission: using the arts to grow a kind and caring society

The idea for People United was developed by Tom Andrews through his participation in the Clore Leadership Programme, and builds on earlier experiences establishing the charity Music for Change. He wanted to address what he saw as “the need for greater kindness and compassion and a sense of connection, looking at a complex world of diversity and division and inequality, and thinking: how can we respond to that? What’s at the heart of that? What are the things that bind people to one another? Often we focus on what’s wrong but we wanted to reverse that, look at what good things happen when people connect, and what are the conditions that allow us to care and do positive things to one another. Our belief is that the arts have a very distinct potential to enable that to happen. The arts are brilliant at changing the way we see the world, connecting people, enabling us to step into other people’s shoes. We see it providing a space to enable connections to happen, to enable empathy to grow, to enable people to feel more confidence in making a difference in the world or in their communities.”

The Work

People United is often described as a “a creative laboratory”, combining theory and practice, with a methodology that involves exploring ideas with different artists and art forms, often co-creating or co-producing with participants. Its work has three strands:

1: Place-based participatory projects

These happen in an area, town, estate or community and can last three or four years. “Usually we spend a year just researching, listening and making connections; we have a year of developing work with people guided by their stories; and then we have a year of mentoring and supporting local people to carry on and develop work in their own way.” Often those projects have a central theme focusing on the assets of the people within the community: the first set were collected within the banner We All Do Good Things, the next set was called The Best of Us. Outcomes depend on “listening to people and seeing what bubbles up: it might result in a community choir being set up, regular connections between groups or a festival. In Herne Bay we put together a Giant Picnic which was a free gathering of all of the arts organisations, as well as voluntary organisations, to come together and celebrate what was good about the community. After a further year of support, it has now been going on for six or seven years – led by local people – and each year brings 1,500 people together.”

2: Artist Commissions

In this strand People United advertise for artists, from any discipline (but often involved with socially engaged practice), to “collaborate with communities or other arts organisations to explore and illuminate a theme. We look at universal themes that people have been grappling with for centuries: wisdom, empathy, hope, justice, courage, love. We worked on Belonging with the National Theatre, and looked with Manchester Museum at Wonder and our place on the earth, using their collection to work with hundreds of singers to do a performance of original songs around that.” This strand seeks both to illuminate “common human traits and strengths that connect us all” and to push artistic practice. For instance, the National Theatre specifically wanted to work with People United to create something that wasn’t theatre. The work created was a light installation in Brixton ice rink made by skaters who tracked each other’s journeys to the rink on the ice using GPS technology.

3: Research

People United is based in an Innovation Centre on the University of Kent campus, and works with the University of Kent School of Psychology, and with researchers, to test “whether our work really does make a difference, to attitudes and behaviour. We do that long-term: with our first work in three primary schools – one in Halifax and two in Kent – we did surveys before we started, during, afterwards and a year down the line, not just in the schools we worked with but within control schools with similar demographics, to measure the impact that the arts had on what academics would call pro-social behaviour. Working with our academic partners we have developed a model (explored in our Arts and Kindness paper) that proposes that the arts has a particular role in bringing people together and growing the conditions that lead to caring communities.”

Radical kindness

They admit kindness can get dismissed as “fluffy”, but argue: “Our research and the practical application of our work grounds the concept. And when you look at kindness in relation to systems, it becomes quite a radical concept. What does a kind school look like, a compassionate hospital, a caring community? What does an ethical government look like? What does an ethical arts organisation look like – how do you welcome people, who are the people, what content do you have, what are the values? Does it enable people, or challenge norms? It’s looking at our children’s education, emotional resilience and social skills; the need for creativity in businesses; the ability for the arts sector to work collaboratively in a system of competition.”

And with the word kindness: “you can speak to anyone, from any background, young, old, and everyone can talk to you about someone that’s made a difference to their lives and how they have supported someone else in some way. Sometimes if you start with the arts, it can discount people, whereas if you start with some human strength around kindness, everyone has a connection to that.”

“Sometimes if you start with the arts, it can discount people, whereas if you start with some human strength around kindness, everyone has a connection to that.”

Challenges

People United faces two key challenges in pursuing its path:

1: Capacity

Having always worked in much bigger organisations, including Tate, English Heritage, Museum of London and the Walker Art Gallery, Tina Corri particularly feels the shift to a tiny organisation where “you’re trying to do your five-year strategic plan and the next minute picking up the phone and paying people’s wages. Having the opportunity to think deeply, creatively and thoughtfully about where we’re going as well as keeping things going operationally can at times be really quite difficult.” But she also appreciates this as an opportunity: “You can be much more autonomous and much more in control of what you’re doing, and you can be quicker, more agile”.

2: Communication

This takes two forms. Firstly, People United works across multiple sectors, including business, the arts, the voluntary sector, and with think tanks looking at pro-social behaviour, and yet these areas often feel like separate silos: “It’s an opportunity if we can make strategic alliances but it can feel fragmented, like no one is listening to one another.”

Secondly, it’s difficult to tell the story of this work: “We could be better at amplifying our voice. We’ve got a really powerful and interesting message, and are doing something distinctive within the arts, and we just need to spend some time blowing our trumpet to say, we don’t have all the answers but here’s another way of looking at things. As a small organisation, we can’t change everything, but what we can do is provide a spark and then support other people to take that on, whether that’s in the community or wider, nationally.” This creates another challenge: “to track the multiplier effect of what we do”.

“We’ve got a really powerful and interesting message, and are doing something distinctive within the arts, and we just need to spend some time blowing our trumpet to say, we don’t have all the answers but here’s another way of looking at things.”

What next?  

People United provide that spark not only through working with artists and communities, but with a defined advice and mentoring strand. The intention for the next few years, says Corri, is to develop that strand, “offering support, training and courses around these themes of art and community cohesion”, but also growing a team of “artist associates, research associates and community associates who will help us, whether by running a course in a different part of the country, or speaking at a conference on our behalf, or working in a community representing People United”.

This will build on the research People United has been accumulating, and Corri looks forward to publishing “a research report gathering ten years of our theory and practice together which I’m hoping will contribute usefully to wider conversations about tolerance and well-being and connecting people. For us there’s something important about research and how that can add to making the case for the very particular role that the arts can play in enriching communities, people’s lives, people’s places.”