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GHP will facilitate the effective delivery of local and national policy and the broadening of the democratic process of community engagement, through an inter-disciplinary working approach driven by creativity.
Background
Green Heart is a Partnership initiative between Arts Council England, East and the eleven local authorities of Hertfordshire that aims to achieve growth and capacity between the arts and environment sectors. It looks to affect social change through policy development and realise creatively led capital development through informed joined-up decision making.
As one of the Arts Council England East’s Arts Generate programmes, GHP works with Hertfordshire’s local authorities using creativity to address government priorities beyond the arts sector and demonstrate the added value of working in partnership.
GHP engages Arts Development Officers and artists alongside Planners, Environmental Officers and others in a similar role in councils. It develops projects relating to public space, buildings and infrastructure that have a significant impact on the wider public environment. Its key focus is on involving creativity and artists in the early stages of developing such projects.
As a result it aims to:
- Develop much stronger inter-departmental and inter-agency working
- Involve communities in developing their environment
- Improve the design quality, environmental sustainability and quality of projects
GHP works with local authorities at all levels from policy and strategy development through to delivery. GHP also aims to demonstrate the value of the arts in wider public policy. This should lead to a wider recognition and use of the arts in pursuing environmental and other public policy goals.
The key objective for the next three years of GHP is:
To support partnerships between the arts and local government non-arts sectors across policy, strategy and delivery of vibrant communities by:
- Embedding the GHP approach within the county of Hertfordshire, and presenting it as a model for creatively driven partnership working in the region and beyond
- Employing creativity to help make communities and their environment more sustainable
- Increasing and highlighting arts’ role and value in cross-departmental spend decisions
- Assisting with the effective delivery of local authority outputs through community engagement
- Developing quantitative and qualitative evidence of the wider impact of the GHP model
The Work
By using artists to instigate critical and creative thinking within inter-disciplinary teams of local authority officers, GHP has developed an innovative approach to developing vibrant communities.
At a time when the Local Strategic Partnerships and Local Area Agreement targets encourage partnership-building and long-term community engagement, GHP offers a way forward with creative vision, support and mentoring for officers charged with delivery.
GHP aims to address the inevitable knowledge gaps in the project teams by bringing on board additional partners or specialist services to provide expertise, personnel and creative solutions.
With all projects, GHP strives to develop a practice of creative collaboration that informs joined-up decision making and achieves sustainable solutions for the physical and social aspects of open space across the county. This process is often supported by placing artists at the heart of the community where they can capture the perceptions of local people in a way which can be fed back to the team to inform their decisions.
Project Plan
The GHP vision will be delivered through the following three strands of work :
CONNECT- GHP will continue to develop close, practical, working relationships and projects through its inter-disciplinary model of working. Recognising the creatively-led multi-disciplinary approach GHP will facilitate an inter-disciplinary vehicle for project delivery. Working within the public, private and voluntary sectors in Hertfordshire, GHP will identify and link with regional and national contacts and initiatives. This strand covers the core administrative, management and delivery of the partnership.
RESOURCE- This strand provides professional training and capacity building through mentoring and networking for arts and environmental contacts and artists. Team development will be focused on those local authorities where there have been no GHP projects to date.
PROJECTS- This strand covers creative development and project management of the GHP projects themselves. All of this project work is informed through the GHP model of creative engagement: Perception AREA. Perception AREA uses creative practitioners to engage and capture the perceptions of a large number of local people from diverse backgrounds and age groups in relation to aspects of their open space.
GHP projects can be split into:
Policy Development: GHP works with its partners to creatively address the development of policy, strategy and guidance tools which can support the creation of high-quality public spaces.
Capital Development: Led by creative practitioners, GHP inter-disciplinary teams collaborate on capital development of innovative and sustainable public spaces.
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