Derbyshire Makes: Embedding Community-Led Culture
Following the success of Derbyshire Makes 2025, we’re delighted that Local’s contract has been extended through to Summer 2027.
But this isn’t just a continuation of delivery. It’s an opportunity to deepen an approach to cultural programming and placemaking that sits at the heart of our practice.
At Local, we believe culture should not be designed for communities. It should be designed with them, and increasingly, by them. High-quality artistic programming and democratic participation are not opposing forces; they are interdependent. Derbyshire Makes has allowed us to demonstrate how those systems can work at scale, across a whole county.
Women Who Make: Leadership, Voice and Visibility
Women Who Make is guided by a women-led curatorial team - a deliberate and values-driven choice.
We recognised early on that representation is not a thematic add-on; it is structural. By establishing a women-led curatorial model, we created space for leadership, authorship and visibility in a sector that has historically undervalued women’s creative labour, particularly in craft and textile traditions.
The programme spans festivals, talks, markets, commissions and community activity. But equally important is the network it sustains, connecting makers across districts, generations and disciplines.
Women Who Make is not a one-off event series. It is a growing platform. A visible ecosystem. A mechanism through which local creative economies are strengthened and supported year-round.
This layered, long-term thinking is central to our approach.
Dare to Dream: Expanding Participation
Dare to Dream began as a mass-participation invitation: create a flag or banner from unwanted textiles expressing your dream for a better future.
What has emerged is something far more expansive.
For 2026–27, we have extended the engagement programme significantly - widening outreach to schools, community groups, heritage organisations, businesses and grassroots networks across the county. Sewing bees have become intergenerational meeting points. Workshops have travelled to villages, libraries and neighbourhood spaces.
The ambition is simple but radical: everyone can take part.
We have been intentional about removing barriers - offering free activity, working through trusted local partners, and designing activity that is adaptable to different settings and confidence levels.
Mass participation, when thoughtfully structured, builds belonging. It strengthens confidence. It invites civic imagination.
Dare to Dream demonstrates how a creative prompt can become shared infrastructure - a connective thread across place. Make sure to get involved, and join us for the Finale event in 2027.
The Makory: Taking the Offer Outward
Our close collaboration with Derby Museums on The Makory, the mobile museum and makerspace, has been another cornerstone of the programme.
Rather than expecting audiences to travel to a cultural venue, The Makory goes on tour.
It visits towns, estates, rural communities, schools and festival hubs - bringing high-quality making equipment, creative facilitation and exhibition content directly to people. Alongside hands-on activity, the associated Derbyshire Makes History exhibition will spotlight local inventors and stories of innovation, connecting past ingenuity with present creativity.
This outward-facing model matters.
Access to cultural opportunity is uneven. By physically moving the infrastructure, we challenge that imbalance. We test how institutions can operate beyond their walls, and what happens when cultural assets are shared more democratically.
The Makory tour is a practical example of how partnership working can shift systems, not just deliver events.
MAKE Room: Action Research in Practice
Running alongside Derbyshire Makes, MAKE Room has been a significant action-research programme exploring environmental connection, creative engagement and regenerative art practice - designed and developed in collaboration with Glassball Studio.
Conceived as a roaming, artist-led engagement space, MAKE Room invited people to pause, notice and reconnect with landscape and materials - not as passive backdrop, but as collaborator.
Rather than touring a fixed artwork, MAKE Room travelled as a process. Each iteration responded to local context. Ideas evolved through participation.
This approach allowed us to test methods for climate-focused creative engagement - embedding reflection, care and collective thinking into hands-on making.
As we move into the next phase of our work, we plan to expand and build on MAKE Room through our social enterprise, developing scalable toolkits, training and engagement frameworks that can travel beyond Derbyshire.
Action research is not abstract in our practice. It is embedded in delivery. It informs how we design systems that can grow.
Scaling Cultural Democracy
Across all of this work runs a consistent thread: cultural democracy.
For us, this means designing and implementing structures through which communities are not simply consulted, but actively involved in shaping the cultural offer in their place. It means building leadership pathways. It carries sharing authorship. It prioritises investing in local capacity.
This approach also complements our work across UK City of Culture and Town of Culture initiatives, where cultural programming must operate alongside long-term placemaking and governance design.
The learning from Derbyshire Makes is significant: it demonstrates that democratic cultural systems can function across multiple districts and diverse communities - rural and urban, heritage-rich and future-facing.
Scaling these systems is integral to the future of culture. Not as a slogan, but as practical infrastructure.
Looking Ahead to 2027
With our contract extended through to Summer 2027, we now have the opportunity to deepen partnerships, expand participation and build towards an ambitious culmination for Derbyshire Makes.
We will continue leading the countywide projects - Dare to Dream, Women Who Make and The Makory tour - alongside producing six new Derbyshire Makes History films and overseeing marketing and audience development for the wider programme.
Most importantly, we will continue working with people across the county to design culture that reflects who they are, where they are and where they want to go.
Culture does not grow by accident. It breathes and expands through relationships, trust and shared imagination.
Derbyshire Makes has shown what is possible when those conditions are nurtured.
We’re excited for what comes next.
