This episode took several turns for the unexpected and veered wildly off piste in ways that turned out to make for a very interesting discussion. We begin with Chris Baldwin mysteriously missing in action, as Owen Kelly and Steve Trow discuss the ways in which the distribution of lottery funding has led to poorer areas effectively donating money for cultural provision in much richer areas.
As Steve reaches his conclusions Chris Baldwin arrives from somewhere in Bulgaria and somehow brings the recording crashing to a halt. Once we have reconnected we discover exactly what has delayed Chris, and go on to discuss what we might learn from it in terms of community, solidarity and the climate crisis.

On Culture of Possibility podcast #32, François Matarasso and Arlene Goldbard talk with Caron Atlas of Naturally Occurring Cultural Districts New York (NOCD-NY) and Arts & Democracy, two excellent groups that bridge culture, communities, and policy.
Caron shares a wealth of stories of how creativity can be built into the fabric of communities, informing life on the ground as well as policymaking, including NOCD-NY’s recent forum to reimagine New York City.
Learn about participatory budget, trust-based funding, and much, much more.

We spoke with Ed Carroll and Vita Gelūnienė in April, as part of the series of ICAF specials, when we discussed The Cabbage Field, a community opera developed by Zemuju Sanciu Bendruomene in Kaunas in Lithuania. While attending ICAF we discovered that Ed knew a lot more than we did about the internal workings of the Faro Convention, and we asked him to explain it to us.
In this episode Ed does just that. The Convention “is based on the idea that knowledge and use of heritage form part of the citizen’s right to participate in cultural life as defined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights”. Article 1 of the convention states that "rights relating to cultural heritage are inherent in the right to participate in cultural life." Article 4 states that "everyone...has the right to benefit from the cultural heritage and to contribute towards its enrichment."
The convention itself acts as a “framework convention” and a kind of lodestar for FCN, the Faro Convention Network, which guides the work and offers “extensive knowledge, expertise and tools, within a framework for constructive dialogue and cooperation”.

According to Wikipedia, “Cory Efram Doctorow (born July 17, 1971) is a Canadian-British blogger, journalist, and science fiction author who served as co-editor of the blog Boing Boing. He is an activist in favour of liberalising copyright laws and a proponent of the Creative Commons organization, using some of its licences for his books. Some common themes of his work include digital rights management, file sharing, and post-scarcity economics”.
He recently coined the neologism “enshittification” to describe the process that online platforms go through, from offering their users free services, to offering advertisers cheap access to their users, to trapping both in a walled garden, to dying as both users and advertisers struggle to break free.
Like all neologisms the term does not teach us anything new. Rather it enables us to name and therefore discuss something we have kind-of known for some time. In this episode Owen Kelly looks at some of the implications of these discussions.

Concluding the special Miaaw at ICAF series, Owen Kelly talks with Will Weigler, a community-engaged theatre maker, writer and storyteller based in Vancouver Canada.
In 2017, his book, The Alchemy of Astonishment, won the American Alliance for Theatre & Education's Distinguished Book Award for outstanding contribution to the field. The New York City Department of Education adopted The Alchemy of Astonishment, and distributed decks of the staging strategy cards and books to K-12 theatre teachers in all five boroughs of the city.
Will Weigler acted as the official rapporteur for the ICAF Festival and we met him several times while we roamed around Rotterdam. In this conversation he talks about the nature of that role, the purpose of having a rapporteur at an event like ICAF, and the possibilities he sees for further developing the role at future gatherings.

On Culture of Possibility podcast #31, François Matarasso and Arlene Goldbard talk with Maribel Legarda, artistic director, and Beng Cabangon, executive director of the Philippines Educational Theater Association, PETA, founded in 1967!
PETA is an amazing amalgam of in-person performance, streaming, workshops, and festivals, led by a large group of artist-teachers, many of whom began as teenagers. We talk about PETA’s creative strategies to navigate massive political changes, the pandemic, and radical shifts in the support environment.
You will want to know more about this inspiring, resilient, community-based group.

Born in Vienna in 1926, Ivan Illich acted as a Roman Catholic priest, a theologian, a philosopher, and a radical social critic. He died in December 2002.
His 1971 book Deschooling Society criticises modern society's institutional approach to education, an approach that constrains learning to narrow situations in a fairly short period of the human lifespan. His 1975 book Medical Nemesis argues that industrialised society widely impairs quality of life by overmedicalising life, pathologizing normal conditions, creating false dependency, and limiting other more healthful solutions.
Illich called himself "a Wandering Jew and a Christian pilgrim" and we can find the core beliefs that held his intellectual wanderings together discussed in a more general form in his 1973 book Tools for Conviviality.
In this episode Owen Kelly reads excerpts from Tools for Conviviality, a book he has returned to again and again, to make sense of the arguments that Illich proposes - while wondering how we can get there from here, a question that Illich himself dismisses.

Sophie Hope recorded this live report on the final day of the Rural School of Economics summer camp, organised by Kathrin Böhm and Wapke Feenstra of Myvillages, and the Scottish Sculpture Workshop. The camp took place in July 2023 in Lumsden in Aberdeenshire, the home of the Scottish Sculpture Workshop.
She talks with fellow participants about what they got up to during the summer camp and some of the questions that came up during their stay in rural Aberdeenshire. They explore reflections and suggestions on the issue of “Who has the Energy?”, the question set for the summer camp so that they might explore the material and immaterial energies that support cultural work.