After an amazing 2019, we kicked off 2020 with this 2 minute film of what we got up to last year with the Culture Minister, Stormzy and Nile Rodgers and a few School Communities and Creative Carers across the UK. And announced a new hashtag…
A NEW DECADE: 1984 2.0
Despite a last minute #EPICFAIL19 or two, we write this at the end of a great year for us but also one of the most tumultous for our country’s history, well recent history.
The year got off to a great start with a name check for us on BBC Radio from global guru Richard Gerver with a call for the Prime Minister and Stormzy to Collaborate as you can see in the clip on the right.
FROM #ARTCONNECTS19
So… the million dollar question is… how do we start sticking our country back together?
Well we feel that art has a major part to play in this and themed our 2019 around it.
Yes ART: the killer combination of Creativity, Tech and People, which is why the theme of our year long Festival of Creative Schools, Work and Lives for 2020 will be Collaboration.
And, unless anything changes, we’re confident we have Boris Johnson’s ‘One Nation Government’ behind us too, as the then Culture Minister Jeremy Wright, who we dubbed the Minister of Collaboration at an event he invited us to last January has ring fenced £120m of funding and has plans a foot for National Festival of Creativity in 2022. Read more about that here.
If you’d like to sign up for updates and inspiration as we roll this out, sign up here now.
If you want to know more about the thinking behind it and what you can do, read on.
#COLLABORATE20
This theme was inspired by many things:
AN EDUCATOR
We were blown away in 2019 when the author of an upcoming book sent us a PDF of it in confidence a month before it was due to be published.
It was about Education and a Manifesto for Change, with a core theme around the need for communities and companies to collaborate for and with their schools.
Its author, Richard Gerver is one of the world’s most respected authors, thinkers and doers on education, innovation and leadership and most generously keynoted at an amazing event we held in London called the #ARTofCOLLABORATION.
As the UK’s most followed education tweeter Ross McGill said in his preface to the book “It starts with you and it starts now”
A MUSICIAN
Our kids are obsessed with celebrity. Will never forget the reaction from a bunch of kids in a school in Hull on seeing a remote control model car, they had just seen in a YouTube video in an assembly. Yes, it was that famous! Our Inspirator programme reaches out to world famous creatives to work with us, using their art to inspire our kids to connect with their art in this way.
So can you imagine how excited we were, let alone the kids in a school in Toxteth were, when we showed them an interactive chat we had made with one of the word’s most inspiring, creative and generous people whose song ‘We Are Family’ was celebrating its 40th Anniversary?
Yes, when Nile Rodgers said “To me, collaboration is everything’ we knew we had another tick for #COLLABORATE20.
A COMPANY
STEAM Co. is here today because of one company, a company that like us probably isn’t perfect but has stood by and been a rock to us.
Five years ago, because no one had heard of us they wouldn’t write about us or let us speak at their events so we rented the Royal Institution and ran our own event to relaunch STEAM Co. on a stage where Michael Faraday had literally demonstrated the STEAM power of electricity for the first time back in the 1850’s.
Steve Vranakis, one of the UK’s most respected creatives and the creative director of this company not only agreed to speak at the event but also arranged for a full TV crew to come and film/livestream it as his company had just launched a video platform.
A year later we announced our first regional launch event in Liverpool with Sir Ken Robinson, in the face of frankly vile criticism of his work on creativity from a government backed ‘tsar’.
We couldn’t give away tickets and were on the verge of cancelling it when, quite independently, Nishma Robb from the same company stepped up and covered our core costs to stage and film the event.
We wouldn’t have the inspiring interview with Sir Ken Robinson at the bottom of this page if it weren’t for her.
Similarly this year, we managed to catch a magic moment with a young girl at Copenhagen Primary in King’s Cross.
This school is a few hundred metres from the European HQ of this company when we were running one of five #ARTofCODE sessions sponsored as part of an initiative around creative and digital skills instigated by the former Chairman of this company, Erick Schmidt, a baton taken up by its current EMEA President, Matt Brittin.
This company, to us, embodies our definition of art - the killer combination of Creativity, Technology and People.
They have an initiative called 20% time where one day a week, all staff are encouraged to work on some thing not directly related to their day job, to foster collaborations beyond Google.
Yes, Google are one of several companies like Barclays, BT, Cass Art, AirBnB and National Grid we’ve worked with that have inspired the hashtag #COLLABORATEforCREATIVITY
NOT A COMPANY
The worst thing anyone can call STEAM Co, is a company, thinking that the Co. stands for Company.
Well it doesn’t, it stands for Collaboration.
STEAM Co. is a non-profit Community Enterprise and a collaboration of Creative Carers – Creative People and Organisations who Care about Creativity, our Children and All our Futures. We legally aren’t allowed to make a profit, pay dividends and pay all our taxes, PAYE, the lot and it’s a hard, hand to mouth struggle which is why we regularly issue fund raising calls and apply for grants, often unsuccessfully.
We’ve proven what we do works, many teachers, school leaders, parents and other creative carers and of course, the kids, love our sessions in school communities. These sessions are collaborations of whole school communities.
In 2020 we are going to roll our Phase 2 of our 5 year Strategic Plan.
This will see us set out to prove the Scalability and Sustainability of our community engagement model and we’ll be reaching out to 6 sponsors and 6 match funding organisations.
If that works, in 2022 we will roll out across the UK in anger. More about that later. We hadn’t planned to launch #COLLABORATE20 until 1st January, but it really feels like the time is now to start sowing the seed.
This page was thrown together in a hurry, part way through our Twelve Days of (Creative) Christmas UK Tour, after a momentous Day in a school community in Birmingham yesterday and a week before the Twelfth Day of the tour, in the school community in Bradford, where we did this back in the summer.
To celebrate the #ARTofCOMMUNITY
To show what is possible when we #COLLABORATE20
If you’d like to sign up for updates and inspiration as we roll this out, sign up here now.
FINALLY, A WORD FROM SIR KEN ROBINSON
As an end of year treat, here in full is our interview with that dangerously inspiring man, Sir Ken Robinson in his home city of Liverpool. A wonderful journey, of how other artists like Ken Dodd and The Liverpool Poets inspired him
Thanks to him, Richard, Nile, Nishma, and all other #CreativeCarers like them that have stood with us this far.
The #CarersLikeYou that our kids need.
Thank you all.
