Spirit of 2012 recently celebrated a decade of work based in community, civic pride, wellbeing and community.
Set up in 2013 to harness and build upon the positive vibes that carried us through the summer of the London 2012 Olympics and Paralympics, Spirit has sought opportunities to collaborate with and support practitioners, stakeholders and scholars the length and breadth of the country to – after a fashion – work out the recipe for that certain secret sauce, distill and bottle it. Or, in slightly more ordinary terms, to fund research and other activity exploring how the feel-good factor that builds up around events, festivals and other such happenings can be leveraged for individual, community and wider social good.
At CCSE, we have had the good fortune to work alongside colleagues at Spirit to contribute to this mission on a couple of occasions; first of all in far off times of 2020-2021 when, alongside colleagues from University of Westminster, Technological University Dublin and DHA Communications, we worked on a project examining the Social Value of Community Events. Comprising several elements, this project sought to develop an evaluation framework for use by small, community-led events providing a resource to enable them to reflect on their event, what happened and why. This work linked to our experience and expertise developed in other projects, and allowed us to establish some of the connections and partnerships that we’ve taken forward to develop other work in the years since its completion.
Currently, we’ve had our heads down working on FestivalsConnect, a project contributing to Spirit’s Moments to Connect research portfolio which is focused on providing insights into what it is that catalyses the coming together of people and communities. Our #Fest_Connect work is exploring this conundrum through the lenses of events (specifically, Glasgow Mela, the UCI Cycling World Championships and Event Scotland) and questions of equality, diversity and inclusion (EDI). To date, we’ve popped up at the Mela and the Worlds to ask attendees why these events are important to them; we’ve allied this with deep dives into the literatures and policies relating to EDI and events. We’ll be taking this project forward in 2024, building up our own data and reflections and – in time – adding our outputs to the very considerable, considered and valuable archive of resources that Spirit’s work over the last 10 years has created and inspired.
Happy (belated) Birthday Spirit of 2012… it’s been fun!
This blog was written by Sophie Mamattah, Research Associate at CCSE.
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