The longer I work in community-based creative practice, the more I notice a persistent tension—between the organic, social flow of creative expression, and the rigid, institutional frameworks that seem to regulate and contain it. Creativity, at its best, is spontaneous, relational, and grounded in shared experience. But far too often, attempts to nurture community storytelling and media innovation become bogged down in systems that are more concerned with accountability to institutions than with authenticity to people.
There’s a stark contrast I often reflect on. On one side, we find cultures of hierarchy and approval—where creativity must be justified, sanctioned, and evaluated according to externally defined criteria. This is the domain of funding panels, policy frameworks, and programme strategies. On the other side lies a culture of solidarity, where stories are exchanged freely, recognition emerges naturally from mutual interest, and meaning is built collaboratively in real time. The difference between these cultures isn’t just operational—it’s philosophical. One is rooted in control; the other in trust.
In my own experience developing community media projects, I’ve found that energy and enthusiasm often dissolve the moment a proposal enters the machinery of institutional processes. What begins as a fluid exchange of ideas quickly becomes a negotiation over terminology, reporting requirements, and strategic alignment. The people who get to practise their art freely—who speak with their own voice, without bending to someone else’s agenda—are few and far between. Most are constrained by the funding conditions and expectations set by distant decision-makers, whose definitions of value rarely reflect the lived realities of local creatives.
This imbalance is particularly acute in cities like Leicester, where we should be seeing a flourishing of diverse and innovative creative practice. Instead, we see cautious conformity. Projects are shaped to fit funding guidelines rather than community needs. Innovation is reduced to safe experimentation within strategic boundaries. Divergent ideas and uncomfortable truths are often passed over in favour of pre-approved narratives that feel more manageable to those in positions of power.
What’s missing is a genuine creative marketplace—one that functions as a social economy of exchange, where ideas, experiences and perspectives circulate with minimal friction, and where recognition comes not from institutions but from peers, participants, and publics. Such a space values relationships over transactions, and expression over compliance. It’s here that cultural life feels most alive and democratic.
Local authorities and large cultural organisations need to reconsider their role. Rather than shaping and controlling the creative economy, they should support the conditions under which independent, community-led creativity can flourish. That means stepping back from directive strategies and stepping up to provide access to space, tools, and independent sources of funding that aren’t bound by narrow policy aims.
From a metamodern perspective, creativity is not a commodity to be managed or scaled—it is a relational, often messy process of making sense of the world. It cannot be governed from the top down. It must be allowed to arise from within, through the voices of those who have something urgent and meaningful to say. If that means being uncomfortable, unpredictable, or politically inconvenient, so be it. That is the nature of culture when it is truly alive.
We should be building infrastructures that honour this vitality—not structures that contain it. The goal should not be to measure creativity against institutional objectives, but to cultivate the ecosystems in which it can thrive on its own terms.
Until we recognise this, we will continue to suffocate the very voices we claim to support.
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