The 'MARCH' Network proposes that Assets for Resilient Communities lie at the heart of Mental Health (M-ARC-H) and is dedicated to advancing research into the impact of these assets in enhancing public mental health and wellbeing, preventing mental illness and supporting those living with mental health conditions. Specifically, it will advance our understanding of the impact of social, cultural and community assets including the arts, culture, heritage, libraries, parks, community gardens, allotments, leisure centres, volunteer associations, social clubs and community groups, of which there are an anticipated 1 million in the UK. The network will bring together a Disciplinary Expert Group of researchers with a Policy Group of major national policy bodies, a Patient Public Involvement Group of national mental health charities, and a Community Engagement Group of national organisations. Across three years, our network will unite research with policy and practice to tackle critical questions of research priorities, methods, and implementation in this field; understand and resolve barriers to mobilising community assets; and provide training and support to the next generation of researchers. Specifically, our network will address questions organised in two core work streams (WS): WS1. Cross-disciplinary research and challenges: (a) What evidence is there, from a cross-disciplinary perspective, for how and why community assets impact on public health and wellbeing and the lives of those living with mental health problems, and where are the gaps for future research? (b) How can we use a cross-disciplinary approach to provide meaningful data to different stakeholders and users? WS2. Equity of engagement and access innovation: (a) Who amongst the UK population, demographically and geographically, currently engages with these programmes and how does participation vary dependent on mental health? (b) What are the current barriers and enablers to engagement at an individual, organisational and policy level and how can we develop innovative approaches to enhance engagement, especially amongst the vulnerable? This research work will be complemented by a rich portfolio of impact, engagement and training activities (see 'Impact Summary'). This network aligns with strategic priorities of the AHRC and ESRC as well as having a secondary relevance to the priorities of the MRC (through its consideration of the role of community assets and social prescribing to support medical approaches to mental health), NERC (through its exploration of the impact of green spaces) and EPSRC (through its focus on the opportunities provided by technology for driving research forwards). It has also been designed in response to the Network Plus Research Agenda. In addition to the objectives already discussed in the prior Je-S section, it is responsive to many of the mental health challenges cited in the agenda. For example, the call specification noted that only 25% of people with mental health problems receive ongoing treatment. Whilst there are recognised economic and resource constraints with delivering sufficient mental health services, this Network proposes to focus on the role that existing community assets could play in providing support to a much wider range of people in the UK including those on waiting lists. As another example, the call specification raised that 70% of children and adolescents with mental health problems have not had appropriate interventions at an earlier age. This Network will involve working with policy makers and community organisations to see how research could help overcome barriers to access with the aim of engaging more young people and those who are hard to reach. Overall, the network will seek to understand and support future research into how community assets could be mobilised to encourage more resilient individuals and communities with a greater understanding of and capacity for self-management of mental health.

As cultural artefacts, video games are complex, multi-faceted products that encompass creative practices from character and narrative, interaction and gameplay design, architecture, product and environment design to sound design and composition. Technically they bring together software engineering with maths and physics, AI with networks and user data. Bring these together with a dynamic and competitive commercial environment and a disrupted technology environment and a growing cultural significance and you can begin to appreciate the challenges faced by this industry. SMEs operating in the video games sector are subject to technological, market and platform disruption where platform access and 'discoverability' are significant challenges to product viability. These factors are exerting a downward pressure on innovation and the creation of original IP in the Dundee cluster. The InGame partnership will pursue a highly collaborative, embedded approach to R&D by establishing a dedicated a R&D centre at the heart of the cluster. Artists, designers and creative writers will be co-located with technologists and business specialists to offer a dynamic and responsive resource to engage with three significant high-level challenges - consolidated from issues raised through local consultation, a survey of over 700 UK games studios and the trade body's blueprint for growth - where combined collaborative R&D could lead to significant growth, sustainability and intensification for the computer games cluster in Dundee. Creative Risk: Over the last decade the dominant business model in the Dundee games cluster has shifted from a publishing model where development costs are borne by the publisher in advance of sales income; to a platform model where individual games companies carry the cost of development in return for as larger proportion of the sales revenue. As a consequence the risk attendant with the development of original IP for the games market is, more often than not, fatal for start-up and micro-SME studios. Technological Innovation: Working practices in this cluster are characteristically solution focused and iterative, and often inventive and ingenious. However, technology innovations are not systematically captured or tested for generalization or re-use value. Commercial pressure on value chains has inhibited SMEs from taking on the risk of high-value innovation activity resulting in lost economic opportunity and inhibited cluster growth. Organisational Development: The cluster is characterized by a high number of dynamic micro-SMEs creating content for mobile, tablet and PC gaming platforms. The city is also home to a smaller number of mid-sized SME's with established product portfolios ranging from original franchises, sub-contracted development for established franchises and studios developing games for console. There is a growing professional services sector (accountancy, legal) and cultural scene (galleries and events). R&D in organisational development in this context relates to start-up at company level through to cluster and ecosystem development. The education sector is foundational to the cluster; Abertay University's Center for Excellence in Computer Games Education is characterised by active and mature collaboration between businesses, universities, and agencies of every scale. The University's longstanding relationship with national and multi-national games companies offers a unique opportunity to catalyse the value chain in the Dundee cluster. The academic partnership with Dundee University in Design for Business, and St Andrews School of Management's expertise in Creative Industries offers a world-leading research base for the R&D partnership. The InGAME R&D Center and cohort of Creative R&D Fellows will establish a new mode of engagement for industry and universities to work effectively and responsively to meet the challenge of cross-sector collaborative R&D in the Creative Industries.

Many constructions of the creative economy are celebratory. The creative economy is lauded as a provider of economic growth and good, well paid, jobs. This is alongside the role of the creative economy in a whole range of policy and practice areas, including education, regeneration, and diplomacy. However, as the research giving rise to this proposal has demonstrated, the creative economy is also the site for significant exclusions and inequalities. These include the gender, class and racial character of both production and consumption in the creative economy. Who is missing? follows on from several AHRC funded research projects to consolidate work on the creative economy that has focused on the question of inequality. Moreover, the consolidation of this research will aim to offer approaches to challenge and change the structures of the creative economy that act to exclude. This follow on funding proposal aims to strengthen existing partnerships between academic experts on inequality and campaigning organisations; to disseminate the existing findings of research developed as part of several AHRC funded projects; to co-create new knowledge with organisations working to transform the unequal character of the creative economy; and to exploit existing research activities that will develop organisational, policy making, and practitioner capacity to respond to creative economy inequality. The project consists of three distinct, but complementary, work packages that address the dissemination, co-creation and research exploitation objectives detailed in this outline. The roots of the project are based in two longstanding and successful partnerships between academic researchers working on AHRC funded projects and organisations within the Creative Economy. The first partnership, between the PI and Co-I and Create London, an arts development organisation, resulted in the Panic! Whatever Happened to Social Mobility in the Arts? Project. The second partnership is between the PI and Co-I and Arts Emergency, a charity that supports young people aged 16-19 from disadvantaged backgrounds to pursue careers and education in the arts and then into the creative economy. This has been a four year working relationship informing Arts Emergency's use of academic research for media and public campaigning, as well as shaping their use of data and research in their practice. The project starts by thinking through the needs of the partners for data and research. Work Package 1 (WP1) is focused on co-creating a set of approaches to disseminate the existing research findings in ways that are understandable to public, policy and, most crucially, practice audiences. The second work package (WP2) responds directly to the needs of these organisations for data and research. WP2 will work with Arts Emergency to understand those aspiring to be part of the creative economy, along with re-interrogating existing research data to understand how current inequalities within the creative economy have changed over time. This latter point was the focus of the Panic! Project and Create London, alongside the academic team, are keen to develop and disseminate these findings more widely, particularly to audiences at Arts Council England and Creative Scotland (who have offered letters of support) and the UK's Department for Culture, Media and Sport. Work package 3 (WP3) takes up the dissemination activity for the project, with a PDF publication from Arts Emergency called Who is missing from the Picture: The problem of inequality and what we can do about it. This will be launched at a series of events, delivered by Create London, and produced by the young people working with Arts Emergency (paid as part of the research project), thus taking the research base beyond the academy whilst developing the skills, and the profile, of those aspiring to be part of the creative economy.

This proposal builds on the findings from a two-year AHRC funded research project which was undertaken between 2019-2021. It examined how and why, despite a long-standing international discourse about participation, approaches to increase cultural participation have largely failed to address social inequality in the subsidised cultural sector. It further examined why meaningful policy change has not been more forthcoming in the face of such apparent failure. What we found was the extent to which a culture of mistrust, blame and fear between artists, organisations, funders and the public has resulted in a policy environment that engenders overstated aims, accepts poor quality evaluations, encourages narratives of success and is devoid of meaningful critical reflection. In our academic research outputs we argue that this absence of transparency and honesty limits the potential for "social learning" (May, 1992) which is necessary for greater understanding about the social construction of policy problems, something which is a precondition to any radical change in policy. We offer suggestions as to how failure might be better acknowledged, learnt from, and acted upon by policy makers, funders and art organisations and have developed frameworks and tools which are intended to be of practical use to those working within the cultural sector, in particular those involved in policymaking and grant distribution, but also to evaluators and managers of participatory programmes. By employing participatory research approaches during our earlier research process and co-creating knowledge with our research participants, we have given policy makers and practitioners a real stake in our research. As a result there is a strong appetite from the cultural sector to test our research findings in practice. We have already had requests from a number of evaluation consultants, policy makers and arts networks to work with them to embed our recommendations in practice. Some of these are represented in letters of support attached to this application. This proposal therefore seeks funding to support a number of initiatives to test and develop the recommendations, frameworks and tools designed out of our research in policy and practice. It will do this by working in collaboration with industry, including cultural practitioners, cultural policy makers and evaluators on a number of case studies of learning from failure. It will also build new audiences for the research through feasibility studies with health workers as well youth work and community services to test the applicability of our findings on other parts of the public sector. Funding therefore would specifically be used to - support at least 6 champions from different locations and/or different parts of the arts sector to extend the reach of our research by facilitating opportunities for their networks to discuss failures openly - partner with a targeted group of funding organisation to embed our approach in policy - partner with at least 2 organisations outside the cultural sector to test the transferability of our findings to new audiences - deliver a media campaign to raise awareness of our research - encourage more open conversations about failure to take place by arranging a 'Failspace' conference for cultural sector professionals - create an online repository of 'Failstories' that will act as a longer term legacy of the work

This project follows on from research funded by the AHRC Cultural Value programme which identified a need for small and medium sized organisations in the creative and cultural industries to have resources enabling them to conduct research to develop their audience, participation and programmes. Current research resources available within the creative industries do not account for the complexities of the value-based decision making involved in meeting the needs of current or potential audiences, consumers and participants. While some online and paper-based training resources for creative organisations are available, these tend to be quantitative and 'hard data'-driven for marketing purposes. Such research tools do not provide the know-how and skills to analyse qualitative research data. Small- and medium-sized creative organisations need research know-how and skills to inform their planning and development, and their funding applications. Our experience is that very often small- and medium- sized creative organisations either do not have the specialist research skills, or do not have the money to employ a specialist research agency to generate and analyse research data. The project will co-create a qualitative research toolkit in the form of a website for audience/consumer/participant research with and for small- and medium-sized creative organisations. This co-creation process will include Creative Scotland, its clients and potential clients, other funders, charities, policymakers and academics. This includes nine named partner organisations who will actively take part in research on their own practices in relation to audience development in order to inform the toolkit. The aim of the project is to develop a 'research habit' among creative organisations, which will enhance their ability to develop meaningful programmes of work to retain existing audiences and attract new audiences, and demonstrate this understanding of their audiences and potential audiences to potential funders and supporters. The research team will use tastemaking and cultural value as an innovative and flexible research framework within which to co-create the toolkit's content. This framework has been tried and tested in the PI's Cultural Value study and the PI's three subsequent studies funded by the University of Edinburgh. The framework allows exploration of co-creators' organisational and artistic practices, assisting understanding of where audience/consumer/participant development fits within the organisation's planning and development process. The framework also allows the research team to explore how audience/consumer/participant development practices are informed by the values and tastes of the different organisations' various stakeholder perspectives. This understanding will underpin the toolkit with a depth of knowledge of creative organisations' audience/consumer/participant development research needs that currently-available resources do not provide.