Cornish Distinctiveness Impact Analysis
Key findings
- A key lesson from the programme has been the positive opportunities for partnership working, not least access to expertise and alternative networks.
- The successful delivery of the programme demonstrates the opportunities for a wider mix of funding, for example health funding or business support. This opportunity can be enhanced if ICH and language activities can communicate more effectively with these sectors in ways that they understand, for example mental health benefits, brand recognition and social responsibility.
- Projects need a long-term funding plan to secure progress made to date and to keep the momentum of what has been achieved.
Summary
Funding decisions by Cornwall Council have been well made giving recognition to an impressively wide range of worthy groups of all sizes and maturity creating a step-change in their confidence, ambition and appetite for further development. The increased opportunities to respond to a living heritage has met and stimulated an appetite and curiosity about local culture and tradition, with young people in particular feeling validated by the deepening of their understanding of it and wanting to step up to become the new cultural carriers. In terms of projects receiving grants, the funding has given them an opportunity to ‘do what they do better’ and to create a trajectory for their forward planning, with some larger projects identifying the need for a business forum attached to the work.