[Agri]Culture: Villages In Action

Since 2021, we have been working with Villages in Action to re-imagine and activate rural touring across Devon. Through their new [Agri]Culture model, Villages In Action want to democratise cultural engagement and open up the way rural communities engage with, enjoy and grow new creative opportunities.

Integrating co-produced and participatory work with touring across Devon’s towns and villages, they are embedding a culturally-driven action-network that focuses on growing meaningful social & cultural capital within rural communities.

To do this, [Agri]culture runs four interconnected programme strands:

• Rural Touring & Participation, touring diverse, high quality live shows with workshops & digital work

• Talent Development, supporting excellent regional artists through commissions, scaffold bursaries, rural residences, and peer-led artist skillshare.

• Co-creative Communities, generating new co-creation projects that bring together artists and communities to make new work, and Village Exchanges that help generate ideas, new collaborations and skillshare.

• Stretch Projects, that to extend reach, inclusion & partnerships & engage diverse audiences with hybrid live/digital work & participation.

Filament is supporting two aspects of this work:

• Development: supporting programme development and fundraising, including grant-writing and income diversification through commissioning, new partnerships and advocacy.

• Action learning & evaluation: drawing on Ripple Effect Mapping to capture the quality and resilience of the growing action-network, to understand what is working and why, and to democratise how all in the network input into and benefit from a generous enquiry-led approach to learning and evaluation.