The National Centre for Academic and Cultural Exchange (NCACE) was established in 2020 to champion and support knowledge exchange and wider collaborations between the arts and cultural sector and Higher Education Institutions (HEIs), with a particular focus on evidencing and showcasing the social, cultural, environmental as well as the economic impacts of such activities. ‘Placemaking and levelling out’ has been one of the four core themes guiding NCACE’s work since our inception. We recognise the importance of geography in people’s lives - whether this involves physical boundaries or an affective sense of place and identity in relation to a specific area. We have also seen the rise of rich collaborations between arts organisations and universities, who are partnering to create work which touches upon a host of place-based and place-focused themes. This includes the development of work which attends to our lived experiences of a place. It also can create changes to the built environments and public spaces in which we dwell, as well as the development of local cultural ecosystems. Such collaborative works serve to nurture creative practices within a locale and this survey has given so much supporting evidence about the nature of these fruitful collaborations right across the country. This report has been developed to share the place-focused findings of NCACE’s Collaborating with Higher Education Institutions survey, which was codesigned and hosted by Arts Professional magazine. The survey was launched on March 1st 2021, running for three weeks until March 21st 2021 following dissemination via Arts Professional, NCACE and TCCE networks. In total, 546 individuals completed the survey. The aim was to provide a space for the arts and cultural sector to share their first-hand experiences of collaborative activities with HEIs, with a particular focus on the value these partnerships brought to the organisation and/or the practitioner’s wider creative practice.
