Equal-Works

Background

While the cultural and creative industries (CCI) sector is developing in a dynamic fashion, many local communities are effectively excluded, even within major regeneration projects that have creative components.

Aim

The Last Mile has been set up as a multi-region development partnership (DP) and four-country transnational partnership designed to help people who have demonstrated motivation and aptitude in the creative industries to take the final steps to employment or viable freelance careers.

Objectives

The Last Mile's main strategies are:

• working with the industry to create and improve industry-standard training and qualifications
• building local and regional capacity, tailored enterprise support and an innovative e-commerce platform to extend the market reach and opportunities for BME/minority creatives
• building empowerment and equalities outputs through an integrated monitoring, evaluation and research programme designed to capture and feed back beneficiary experiences, evidence of application of learning and improved capacity, and to record impact on learning, jobs and increased market activity.

• Those from black and other minority ethnic groups
• Women
• Disabled people
• Faith groups
• Those disadvantaged by location, or economic, educational or social background. 

Partnership

The programme partnered with a number of large organisations – Slough and Birmingham City Councils, Manchester Vision, Tribal, Sheffield CIQA, Cumbria Vision, UK Film Council, and Weekend Art College in London, and funded other smaller creative companies such as Flex FX and Vivid, who work with visual artists in Birmingham. The lead partner was Tribal Education and Technology, who also provided technology support and development, and, along with the Institute of Education, University of London, provided background and longitudinal research.

Read more

• The Last Mile: Birmingham Interaction
• The Last Mile: Cultural Industries Quarter Agency
• The Last Mile: Cumbria Vision
• The Last Mile: Equal Invest
• The Last Mile: FlexFX Productions
• The Last Mile: Northwest Vision and Media
• The Last Mile: The Creative Academy Slough
• The Last Mile: UK Film Council and ERA Ltd
• The Last Mile: WAC Performing Arts and Media College

The Last Mile has made a very significant short-term contribution to the diversity of parts of the creative and cultural industries. In a sector where, even in the most diverse parts of the UK, the percentages of employees from BME communities lag well behind regional profiles, working with more than 1,000 BME beneficiaries over a two-year period, and playing a role in enabling some hundreds of them into employment or self-employment, even if a proportion of it is part-time, constitutes a real contribution. The Last Mile has met and exceeded its targets for numbers of people from the BME communities worked with, and it has also sponsored a clutch of Muslim projects and sub-projects ranging from the performing arts to extensive work with female Muslim writers.