About Us

Creative Exchange is a UK registered charity (number 1096765).

Creative Exchange’s vision is for a world where arts and culture play a significant role in human development.

Culture is one of the formative influences on people’s lives. Culture holds our identity and values, and expresses our feelings and ideas.  Working culturally (through creative activities, media and traditional cultures) is part of a process of enabling people to find meaning and advocate for themselves, as part of their sustainable development.

With this vision in mind Creative Exchange projects aimed to gather knowledge about new ways of fighting poverty, conflict, ill-health and injustice and exploring opportunities for change. 
Over 10 years it completed several important studies which provided new information on the relationship between culture and social arenas – international development, HIV and AIDS, conflict transformation, integration and cohesion. For more information see Projects.

This work opened up new avenues for enquiry on the ‘Affective’ nature of arts and culture – the way culture engages with our emotional make-up and enables us to engage, participate and learn.

Creative Exchange worked with local practitioners and grassroots organisations, listening to their knowledge and wisdom of how culture works and influences in people and communities. That we now have access to new knowledge is entirely due to the generosity of our partners in sharing it.

History

Creative Exchange was launched in 1998, following a meeting of artists, development practitioners and policymakers in London in May 1997 which called for the establishment of a network to share information about the role played by arts activities in international development and social policy.

It gained charitable status in 2000. Its charitable mandate – to advance public education about ways in which arts and culture help poor and disadvantaged people improve their quality of life – was specially devised by the Charity Commission since no other charity had previously served to promote the social role of the arts.

Creative Exchange activities helped people connect and share ideas and skills, learn about the use of culture and arts in social settings, and change and influence policy and practice. In many respects, Creative Exchange has simply formalised the informal connections between social, development and cultural activists, which have had been growing since the 1970s. But it also widened this network and introduced many new activists and organisations to the debate.

The internet has been a significant factor in that process. The launch of our Website Resources Centre resulted in an increasing online presence – by 2008 the network reached around 1,800 people via its email bulletin service and around 130,000 annually via the website.

Creative Exchange was a very small organisation of three part-time workers with additional support from consultants and volunteers. Dependence on project funding always made it vulnerable and there were never sufficient resources available to grow a sustainable programme of networking and research. In June 2008, in the face of an increasingly hostile financial climate, Creative Exchange could secure no further funding for projects and the trustees decided to cease operations in July 2008. 

Over 10 years Creative Exchange has found itself operating in a different landscape – it came into being to address the lack of understanding, awareness and support for the role of culture in human development. By 2008, culture had become accepted as a new pillar for EU development cooperation.

Growing interest in this field had been marked by major reports by UNDP (Human Development Report 2004, Cultural Liberty), World Bank (Culture and Public Action, 2004), UNFPA (Culture Matters, 2004). In 2005, the UK Department for International Development (DFID) acknowledged: ‘We want culture to become an inherent component of all development strategies – not just in terms of cultural products, but also in defining the terms of the development debate and the actions that follow. Culture becomes a way of working as well as an end in itself.’

Culture is now on the map of human development and while we would not lay claim to putting it there, Creative Exchange has been part of a coalition of voices determinedly arguing the case.

Vision, mission and values

Vision

Our vision is for a world where arts and culture play a significant role in human development

Mission:

To advance public education about ways in which arts and culture help poor and disadvantaged people improve their quality of life.

Values:

We acknowledge the value of arts, culture and creativity as a foundation for individual and community growth.
We respect cultural rights and will work to achieve better understanding of their role in sustainable development and empowerment.
We believe in policy and practice that enables people to participate in addressing their own needs.
We support the sharing of knowledge to improve the quality of action and policy affecting poor and disadvantaged people.
We strive for equitable partnerships and participation in our work internationally.

Strategic aims:

Providing Information and Services, Improving Policy and Practice, and Strengthening the Network.