Business Plan 2025 to 2029

CONNECT. CREATE. CHANGE.

OUTSIDE Creative People and Places is a community-led arts programme encouraging more people across the Staffordshire Moorlands to experience, create, and take part in cultural activities

Executive Summary

Since 2022, with significant investment from Arts Council England (ACE) and support from Staffordshire Moorlands District Council (SMDC), OUTSIDE has been co-creating arts projects and events with communities across the Staffordshire Moorlands. This rural area, often overlooked and historically underfunded, lies outside traditional centres of power, making our work even more vital.

Social change and community engagement are at the core of OUTSIDE. As a consortium-led programme, collaboration is embedded in our structure, ensuring that our work is shaped by those it serves.

Our consortium partners each bring valuable expertise and support:

Support Staffordshire (the local council for voluntary services) serves as the lead organisation and helps us connect into the voluntary sector.
Staffordshire Moorlands District Council offers match funding and links us to key local priorities, including health and wellbeing, the environment, regeneration, and community development.
Newcastle Stafford Colleges Group provides office space at Leek College and helps us engage with young people.
B Arts, a regional arts organisation, contributes cultural expertise.
OUTSIDE Advisory Group ensures the programme is directly informed by local residents’ experiences.
OUTSIDE Youth Advisory Group brings youth voice to decision-making.

Our small but dedicated team operates from Leek College, working flexibly with a wide range of freelancers, artists and community groups, to realise an ambitious and refreshed business plan for 2025–2029.

Vision

Everyone in the Staffordshire Moorlands has the opportunity to participate in high quality arts and cultural activity. Creativity is embedded as a useful tool to help celebrate both people and place, and respond to the challenges of life in our rural community.

Mission

To make a lasting change in the way local communities take part in, make, and experience the arts. Creating extraordinary moments that encourage the residents of the Staffordshire Moorlands to come together for transformative experiences and celebrations of their place. We’ll explore what it means to live in a rural community, using culture and storytelling as a lens to look at our way of life, reflecting communities back to themselves and creating visibility for those often unseen and unheard. We will invest in and support an ambitious, collaborative, vibrant creative ecology and regenerative future for the Moorlands.

Aims

In 2025 to 2029, we are focussing on the following:

• Breaking barriers to creativity – Bringing high-quality, meaningful arts experiences to every corner of the Moorlands.

• Putting communities in control – Enabling all residents, especially the unseen and unheard, to shape and create cultural activities that reflect their lives.

• Creating unforgettable moments of collective wonder – Sparking joy, connection and belonging through bold, large-scale projects and events.

• Growing a thriving cultural ecosystem – Championing collaboration, experimentation, skills development, sharing and learning across our team, board, volunteers, artists and partners, ensuring long-term impact.

Aims continued…

Reimagining rural life through creativity and play – Challenging perceptions of rural communities by using the arts to explore identity, resilience and possibility.
Strengthening our foundation – Building a resilient, forward-thinking organisation that drives lasting change. Advocating for arts and culture as powerful tools for enriching lives, social cohesion, wellbeing and regeneration, embedding them at the heart of community life.
Making cultural access the norm, not the exception – Deliver a diverse, inclusive programme where everyone can see themselves, their stories and their potential reflected.

OUTSIDE’s work is aligning with the burgeoning culture strategy being developed by Staffordshire Moorlands District Council, which helps to place our contribution to socially engaged practise alongside the wider cultural ecology.

Between 2025 and 2029 we are thinking about our work in terms of 4 core strands to support our aims:

Creative People and Places – our communities
Creative Moorlands – our sector
Connected Communities – our communication
Good Governance – our organisation

A set of key themes were identified through our initial wide ranging consultation and we continue to use these as a lens for our work and a way to help organise our activity:

Place & heritage
Environment & rurality
Play & wellbeing

CONNECT. CREATE. CHANGE

CONNECT

We will meet people where they are. By being visible and available, we build relationships, and together, uncover stories of people and place. Through partnerships with the voluntary sector, local authorities, support agencies and local businesses, we will embed arts and culture as a tool for social change. We’ll convene steering groups to uncover stories, imagine, explore challenges, hopes and ambitions, and seek inspiration. We’ll connect people across the Moorlands as well as regionally, nationally and internationally. We’ll work with 100+ advisory and steering group members per year, across 40+ places, with 50+ partners. 200+ volunteers will offer 5,000+ hours of volunteering by April 2029.

CREATE

We will plan and build a shared vocabulary, creating space for different perspectives, and informed by data and dreaming. We’ll go on visits to see work together so that we have shared experiences. We’ll explore barriers people face on a systemic but also local and personal level. We’ll use our decision-making principle guidelines co-created with our Advisory Group and Youth Advisory Group that see us deliberate ambition and innovation, co-creation and collaboration, sense of place, accessibility and sustainability. We’ll trial activity, projects and events, building skills and confidence, and creatively collecting data. We’ll produce 50+ events per year reaching audiences of over 30,000 annually.

CHANGE

We will analyse, reflect, adapt, build frameworks, look to other sectors for ideas, invite external knowledge, step away, and repeat previous steps. We’ll share our learnings widely with all of our stakeholders. We’ll build our sphere of influence and advocate widely for arts and culture across the Moorlands. We’ll programme 30+ workshops/training opportunities by April 2029.

Set to Thrive with Continued Support and Strong Partnerships

With ongoing support from Arts Council England, Staffordshire Moorlands District Council, a dynamic consortium and strong partnerships, OUTSIDE is poised to continue its transformative journey.