Announcing our 2025 Neighbourhood Artists! 

After a collaborative four-month recruitment process working alongside 13 North Sheffield community organisations, we are delighted to announce our Neighbourhood Artists for 2025! These brilliant artists and projects will be working with us in six North Sheffield neighbourhoods.

(TL;DR – scroll down to skip straight to the artists, or fill in the survey here)

The Story So Far…

Before setting up RivelinCo just over four years ago, we first spoke with over 600 local people to make sure it was something people wanted in their community. Since then our ‘without walls’ cultural programme has been co-designed through consultation with participants and audiences, and has ranged from theatre productions and exhibitions, to creative workshops and drop-ins, to a youth club, repair shops, street art, community sustainability projects and more.

We accidentally became the face of the fight against absentee landlords, and campaigned for policy change and the introduction of High Street Rental Auctions. Our former shop front base has hosted artists, community groups, students, health and nature organisations, council meetings and more. Our work can be hard to describe and often crosses sectors: we are primarily an arts organisation, but we serve under-resourced areas and so our projects inevitably cross over into social justice, community development, and even environmental conservation. 

Through this work, and through – well, *gestures broadly at everything* – we’re aware how much the world has changed in the last four years. Our former co-design process was useful for people who were already coming to things, but it didn’t offer many opportunities for people who aren’t yet engaging with our work to be part of decision-making, or have their voices heard. We want to ensure our creative programme addresses the real gaps and challenges for the communities we serve, and also celebrates the real moments of joy. We don’t think it’s our place to decide what’s most important. 

Neighbourhood Artists is a year-long project, and also a new model of working for RivelinCo which we hope to test, adapt, and repeat. Throughout 2025 we’ll host six exciting creative projects in six areas of North Sheffield: Foxhill, Hillsborough and Malin Bridge, Parson Cross, Stannington, Winn Gardens and Wisewood. Each project is bespoke for the area, and through creative engagement the projects will ask local people questions about how they feel about where they live, what they might like to challenge, change or celebrate, how they’re doing that already, or how they’d like to be part of that change.

By the end of the year we’ll have collected and mapped information from hundreds of local people, and we’ll use this data to programme artists and projects which directly address community needs or desires – to make sure our work remains relevant, inclusive, and interesting for the people we work for and with, and provides genuine opportunities for community power and positive change. We’ll repeat this model each time we work in a new North Sheffield neighbourhood, or when there is a period of significant change for one of the areas or communities we already work with. 

It is an experiment. We expect parts of it will work brilliantly and other parts may fail. It’s important that they do, otherwise we won’t learn from it. But we’ll do our best to ensure projects can thrive or fail safely, and that artists and communities will have a good time making them happen with us. We’re excited to get started!

The Process So Far…

We first applied to Arts Council England for funding to support this project back in June 2024, but unfortunately our application was rejected despite strong positive feedback. We reapplied in September, and on 18 December we received the news that it was funded, which was a huge relief – as an organisation with no core funding (yet!) we also rely on project funding like this to support our team’s salaries and core costs, and things were getting hard.

We immediately set up meetings with our community partners in each area. These conversations took several weeks – many community organisations are even less resourced than us, and often led by brilliant volunteers with a lot to do and limited time to do it in. But everyone was excited about the possibilities. 

The call-out for expressions of interest was launched in January and open for 5 weeks. We received 84 applications. We invited 25 to Stage 2, where we asked for a bit more information about their ideas. We held six panels with our community partners to go through shortlisting together, and where there was a close tie between two projects in some areas we also held interviews.

We learned a lot from this process: 

Some things we’re proud of: 

• The call-out and process. It was long and detailed, but accessible and thoughtful too. We received positive feedback from several artists who appreciated our approach to the call-out, and the two online Q&A sessions we held about it. 

• Providing artist commissions of this scale in Sheffield, particularly in these neighbourhoods. It’s rare to see open commissions like this in Sheffield and we feel very proud to be getting £25,000 out to artists, plus project budgets and other support. 

• We sent individual feedback to every person who applied. This is something we try to do for every recruitment process. It takes a long time and we are a tiny team, but it’s important. 

• We paid £50 to artists who got through to Stage 2, as a contribution towards their time spent on the application. Though this wasn’t a lot, we received feedback that it was appreciated and meant artists could focus a couple of hours on the work. 

• The shortlisting panels were inclusive and residents from each area were represented. 23 people were involved which included community organisation representatives, service users, and local residents. 

• Applications received at Stage 2 were a diverse range of projects, from a diverse group of artists. The dataset is too small to publicly share much of it, but as an intergenerational organisation we were particularly interested in the age split (we’ve expanded the ranges for here for anonymity): artists invited to Stage 2 included 48% aged 20-39, 44% aged 40-59, and 8% aged 60+. 

Some things we’d do differently next time: 

• We’d change what we ask for at each stage. We tried to make the application process as simple as possible via expression of interest, but this was too open and meant we had different levels of information from different artists, so we asked specific questions at Stage 2. If we did it again, we’d ask specific questions at Stage 1 (keeping them simple) and offer an opportunity for people to adapt their answers at Stage 2, based on feedback from the panel. One applicant dropped out at Stage 2 because they felt it would have been too much work for them, which is fair. 

• We’d invite fewer artists to Stage 2, but pay each of them a bit more for their time. Alternatively, if there were only 2-3 strong projects, we may not have a Stage 2 and instead go straight to interviews with community panels. 

• We’d be quicker with our follow up calls. In the emails sent to unsuccessful applicants at Stage 2, we offered a follow-up call to discuss feedback in more detail. We then took a few weeks to arrange those calls. We are a small team, but even so, this was too long. 

• We’d present the information differently at the community shortlisting panels, using more of a visual summary. For some partners, e.g. schools and library volunteers, it suited them because they were used to looking at applications in this way. For others, we think we could improve the experience. 

• We did not ask for diversity monitoring data at Stage 1. This was an oversight, and means it’s hard to use the Stage 2 data meaningfully, as we don’t know how it compares to Stage 1 other than anecdotally. 

• The projects taken to Stage 2 were the ones which were focused and didn’t try to do too much. We received several applications from artists who wanted to deliver a huge list of different activities, which all sounded great but were too much for the size of the commission, and didn’t have a clear central idea. We would clarify this further in the commission brief next time.   

What’s Next…

The projects will be taking place between May and November 2025 – each project has its own timescale for delivery. Some will happen over a shorter intensive period, and others will be more spread out with a bit of activity each month. 

In May we’ll be recruiting Community Producers for each area, a role which supports a local person who doesn’t have a professional arts background to be involved in coordination of the projects. We’ll be recruiting these roles through our community partners, and other partners across the city who help people to access local opportunities.

We’ll advertise any open opportunities to get involved via our website, newsletter, social media and via print in each neighbourhood. We’ll also be working closely with several groups in each neighbourhood throughout each project. 

If you live in one of the areas and you’d like to feed into the consultation, you can also do that via this simple survey – we’d love to hear from you!

Many thanks to Arts Council England and Sheffield City Council’s Central and North Local Area Committees for the funding that is making this project possible.

Eggs Collective, Stannington

Grace Jandrell, Hillsborough and Malin Bridge

Sarah Lasoye and Wemmy Ogunyankin, Parson Cross

Ian Nesbitt, Winn Gardens

Jess Gibson, Foxhill

Jo Veal and Patrick Amber, Wisewood