(top) Bourgeois & Maurice – Norfolk & Norwich Festival 2014. Photo: Chris Taylor. (bottom) City Textures, Abby McFaul and Stef Kalife, 2015. Photo: Gorm Ashurst

What Next? is a free-to-access movement that brings freelancers, small and large organisations together to debate and shape arts & culture.

Our Vision:

We want to see a situation in the UK in which arts & culture are playing a vital contribution to creating an equitable society, improving quality of life for all.

This will be achieved when our sector:

1. works together to take ownership of the civic role of arts & culture
2. sector leadership reflects the full diversity of our communities
3. when everyone is able to access the full benefits of arts & culture.

Our Mission: 

Through local chapters and UK wide meetings, we convene a space to bring together the breadth of leadership within our sector, where challenge and possibility can lead to shared priorities and collectives responses.

We advocate and create conditions for ‘systems leadership’: an understanding of leadership that values the potential of a wide range of actors working together to achieve more than we can do alone or in silos.

We bring the arts & culture sector together as a ‘system’ by:

• Bringing freelancers together with leaders of small & large organisations, to strengthen links across the arts & culture
• Operating throughout the UK, helping to connect up local & UK-wide agendas & initiatives
• Being entirely free to access, with no membership fees or complex or exclusive recruitment processes 
• Being voluntary in nature, providing opportunities for people to exercise their own agency

Our Shared Values: 

Our movement is guided by the following values which form a touchstone for our work:

• Democracy: creating models for open & purposeful conversation
• Equity: creating conditions for an equitable movement & society
• Leadership: building the conditions for everyone in our movement to make change
• Creativity: embedding & celebrating creativity across our movement
• Generosity: sharing our skills, expertise & resources with each other
• Trust: building relationships & a more resilient sector

Everyone is encouraged to get involved with What Next? by joining your local chapter, setting up a new chapter or following the movement on social media.

The arts and culture enhance every aspect of our lives: the vibrancy of our cities, the identity of our rural communities, the future prospects of our children, the quality of our democracy, the sustainability of our environment, the employability of our workforce, our ability to make sense of our own experience and to empathise with others.

We need to make the connections between these apparently diverse experiences through new kinds of campaigning, of advocacy and of collaboration.

We argue for the contribution that the arts and culture make in strengthening every aspect of the national economy, as we do for the contribution to our social wellbeing and cohesion.

We all speak for ourselves but, as a national movement, we coalesce around the highest common denominator of ideas and needs that we can act on. We believe that if we act together, we can maximise the effectiveness of our resources, our arguments, our ideas.

Turning a Little Further community production. Photo: Helen Murray