Winter seems a good time to take stock and look back over what’s been achieved in the preceding year, so here are some of our 2024 highlights. It goes without saying that these things are always a team effort and we’d like to say a huge thank you to everyone who supported us throughout 2024 – our audiences, freelancers, residents, board members, funders, friends, collaborators and colleagues – we couldn’t do any of it without you!
Third Fridays Programme
We continued our successful Third Fridays Programme throughout 2024, opening The Nest every month and sharing our interests and resources with the wider creative community – artists, creative practitioners (both freelance and independent organisations) and other interested parties. Third Fridays are a lively mix of networking, information sharing, sociability, co-working and interesting conversations, activities and workshops. If you have a suggestion for a Third Fridays session, please do pop it in our suggestions box.
In 2024, we brought back some old favourites (like the litter pick, book club and tending to the garden) and tried some new things like a towpath Photo Walk led by Adele Mary Reed, and Clothes Repair Skill Share led by Jules Joannides. These activities were leavened with the quarterly(ish) F13 network meetings, and co-working, open to anyone in the wider creative community in Coventry & Warwickshire.
The Third Fridays programme returns with a creative writing workshop led by Nirmal Purwar on Friday 17th January 2025. >> More details & booking here.
Hatching Residencies & Artist Support
We continued to support locally-based artists in other very practical and individual ways through residencies, mentoring and DYCP & other funding surgeries throughout 2024, including two residencies in association with our friends at MAIA.
In total, 13 artists completed a residency at The Nest this year, and of the 8 Coventry-based artists awarded DYCP funding in 2024, 4 of them were former Nest Residents and 2 of them had received funding advice from Talking Birds prior to making their DYCP application. 1 former resident also attended a funding surgery at Talking Birds before making a successful WMCA Funding Application.
We provided space-in-kind for Maokwo, Theatre Absolute, Oh Snow!, Highly Sprung, Open Theatre, and Imagineer, as well as 6 individual artists.
In addition to the larger events like the Neighbourhood Creative Day (see below), we have also hosted events for Krissy’s Craft Club, Mothers Who Make, the Independent Theatre Council and Live & Local.
Hatching Residencies will re-open for applications in the spring.
The Future Works
In January, with sector friends and colleagues we took the lead on bringing the city back together to heal the wounds left by the collapse of the City of Culture Trust and the loss of the legacy programme. Excitingly, organising and producing The Future Works event was a new start for Coventry in more than one way – with the new collectively held and delivered approach to the city’s Cultural Strategy and Compact first being agreed here.
Talks & Conversations
We held two fascinating panel discussions this year under the Nestival of Ideas banner. In the spring, we explored Rest: Necessity, Resistance or Privilege? with a brilliant panel of former Nest Residents including Sym Mendez, Sam Holley-Horseman and Jaz Morrison. >> Listen Again Link.
And in the Autumn discussion, our fantastic panel included Mandip Seehra, Charlotte Jones and Duncan Whitley. This discussion explored some of the tricky areas around money – specifically fair pay, exploitation and organising – in Fair Pay: balancing creativity and wage labour. >> Listen Again Link.
Neighbourhood Creative Day
In June, we held a Neighbourhood Creative Day to test out (for one day) the recommendation from our Citizens’ Assembly that calls for the establishment of a network of Neighbourhood Creative Hubs.
This hugely successful event was curated by our Creative Community Changemakers – these are participants from the Citizens’ Assembly who subsequently took part in Changemaker training with 64 Million Artists – and they are amazing! The day included a neighbourhood gallery, bike tuning, arts activities, tea and cake, gardening, local history, mindful walks, resting space – and more!
You can read all about the Neighbourhood Creative Day here.
Ethical Fundraising Toolkit
Together with our friends and colleagues at Geese Theatre Company, Fierce, MAIA, Open Theatre and Ort Gallery (all small – and brilliant – arts organisations in the Midlands), we’re so proud to have created this Ethical Fundraising Toolkit. which we published in September.
We hope that this Toolkit will help start (or add to) conversations around the issue – to enable organisations to more confidently apply their values to their fundraising, but also to encourage organisations to talk with funders about where their money comes from – in the hope that this might lead to greater transparency and more ethical investment across the funding landscape. You can download it here.
Outdoor Arts
The Whale has been on its travels, from Saltdean to Redcar, with Hailsham, Gloucester and Coventry in between, and the OakMobile popped up at the Birmingham Weekender with a brand new show inside. Thanks to all who booked – and visited us – in the great outdoors.
We’ve also been working on a new project – working title War/Peace – more news to come in 2025.
Green Ways
Another of the Citizens’ Assembly’s recommendations was Green Ways, which asked what might happen if Coventry neighbourhoods were connected by a network of pocket parks and green spaces with safe, green routes between them for humans and wildlife?
We worked with 8 artists, residents and community groups to begin to test out what it might take to get this recommendation realised – and what it might do for neighbourhoods, communities, and for the city, if it were to happen. You can read more about what we did (and what’s next) here.
Song Slam
A project with Coventry Music, in which we collaborated with students from four Coventry secondary schools and poet John Bernard, to create four original songs which were then performed by the groups themselves (with a bit of help from The Sonoplasts) to their peers in a convivial Song Slam at Draper’s Hall.
Talking Regeneration, Accounting and AI
We’ve been blown away this year by the number of artists and organisations who have asked us to speak about, or advise on, aspects of our practice, and to run workshops or other practical sessions with students, employees or delegates.
As part of wider research projects with academics at both Warwick and Coventry Universities, we’ve sat on end-of-project public panels discussing the role of art, artists and creativity in provoking/enabling corporate action and policy change within Accounting and Artificial Intelligence.
We’ve been asked to speak about Regenerative Creative Practice, and how we approach Environmental Responsibility and Climate Justice in practical terms – assisting other organisations in thinking about and writing their own policies. Marine Studios in Margate have taken inspiration from the Nest Handbook to use as the basis of their own studio handbook and an environmental charity in Kent is looking to incorporate Regenerative Creative Practice as part of their charity’s aims.
We’ve also been asked to speak about how our collective and community-building work, particularly the Citizens’ Assembly, is an essential building block in Regenerative and Climate Adaptive work, most recently to a group on one of the programmes convened by the excellent Julie’s Bicycle.
talking birds 