Together Culture makes space to create, and to become more creative.
Together Culture is a community led, Community Interest Company.
We are gathering a membership community united in their desire to help create a more equitable and ecological creative economy.
We provide facilities, creative leadership and entrepreneurial skills development, momentum, structure, and resources for people to come together and make change happen.
Space to create, to connect, and to build a more imaginative, vibrant, inclusive & ecological creative economy in Cambridge.
Watch our Manifesto, co-created by the Together Culture community over the summer of 2023.
Our members’ experience of the Story of Us Studio
“It feels like an honour to have something made from my story - it’s lovely for something to be about me. I feel quite emotional actually.”
“Sharing my story was cathartic and affirming. I recommend others to do the same. Of course casting off the s@#! that holds you back is part of the process. I look forward to reading others’ stories and seeing the portraits!”
What we’ve done so far
In the Summer of 2023, Together Culture's 100 Founding Members collected hundreds of stories from people aged 3 to 83 across Cambridge to explore the intersection of failure, wellbeing, and creativity.
Why?
To co-create the Together Culture Manifesto, our intent for the culture we will nurture so that everyone in our community is empowered to:
Grant themselves permission to be creative,
discover their talents,
be free to be their authentic selves,
and become more courageous in how they help others.
The Cabinet of Curiosities
From 15 - 20 August, we installed a Cabinet of Curiosities at the Fitzwilliam Museum. Inside, visitors could explore and discover portraits co-created through the summer, and watch the Together Culture Manifesto film made in partnership with Anglia Ruskin University and director Pablo Tranchell.
Our Theory of Change
An introduction to Together Culture’s Theory of Change, from our Founder and CEO Heather Thomas.
We have a vision to create a new way of working powered by artists, social entrepreneurs and change-makers.
By 2033, we see Together Culture as having a monumental social impact. We hold a shared goal of creating a thriving community that will eventually have 1000s of people feeling empowered by each other to build and share a more equitable and ecological Cambridge. We will have a culture of active citizens making a contribution that matters, with the power to redistribute resources and shape a creative economy.*
*What is a creative economy? A creative economy is based on people's use of their creative imagination to increase an idea's value. John Howkins (UCL) developed the concept in 2001 to describe economic systems where value is based on novel imaginative qualities rather than the traditional resources of land, labour and capital.
Our values are the threads that weave through everything we do here at Together Culture.
01 Turn Up:
Show up for each other. Believe it is important and powerful.
02 Collaborate:
See the potential in each other, and in working together. Be equal parts observer and participant.
03 Experiment:
Don’t accept the status quo. Be willing to try something different, creative, and reciprocal.
04 Help Others:
Invest in each other, find connections, listen, be open, non-judgemental and empathetic. Ask ‘How can I help?’
The Living Book
The Living Book is the foundation of every experience you’ll have at Together Culture. It is how we are designing for connection and turning ideas into action.
The Living Book is a guide to the Together Culture values. It’s also a workbook for building the skills that help us develop a creative practice that we can bring into everything we do in life.
Team Together!
Heather Thomas
Founder and CEO
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Heather lives in Central Cambridge and is the founder of Together Culture. After earning her MBA at Copenhagen Business School, she built a cultural hub on Vesterbrogade that used the ideals of the Nordic Food Movement to build a community of foreigners and curious locals who wanted to ‘eat their values’ and develop new relationships with one another and the natural world. She has delivered community building strategies for The Eden Project, The Reader, Science Gallery International, and Sustain. She spent a decade working in communication and development for Tate, the Royal Academy of Arts, and Brighton Dome & Festival
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That place where you go, where you are intensely focused and lost in a rhythm not of your own making. That’s one of Heather’s favourite things about being human. At 47, she is still an avid figure skater. It is the backbone of living a life centred around the joyful discipline of creative practice. Three or four times a week, you’ll find her at Cambridge Ice Arena trying to gracefully pull her leg over her head (she’s learned a thing or two about failure this way too!)
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Heather’s studied history, leadership, loves anthropology and is just dog gone passionate about understanding how people tick, come together, and build new relationships and habits. She wrote a book about how we see ourselves as part of the natural world and how the act of eating can help us develop our identity as nature, it’s called The Mindful Kitchen. Gathering people creatively and designing for connection is one of her favourite things to do. There are a lot of dinner parties in her house.
Ellie Breeze
Co-Founder and Community Director
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Ellie has 7 years’ experience in the arts sector, starting her career at Arts Council England. This was followed by roles at Rowan, an arts charity for adults with learning disabilities, and ActionSpace, an artist development agency. In 2022, Ellie completed Clore’s Emerging Leaders course, where she was able to develop and reflect on her leadership style
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Ellie is a practising artist, and has shown work in exhibitions including The Cambridge Show at Kettle’s Yard in Cambridge (2019), Bloomberg New Contemporaries (2017), and the Marmite Prize for Painting V (2016). In 2021, she completed a residency at Broadway Gallery in Letchworth Garden City, culminating in her first solo exhibition, Home Today, Home Tomorrow. Ellie uses painting as a way to explore the social traditions that she finds in family photo albums; weddings, christenings and funerals feature heavily.
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Freshly graduated and frustrated by the lacklustre Cambridge art scene, Ellie formed the art collective Motion Sickness with two friends. Together, they co-founded Motion Sickness Project Space in 2019 to showcase emerging artists. The resulting community generated 10 exhibitions, a series of artist networking events, and various events, talks and performances until the closure of the space in 2022. Learn more about this project on our blog.
Hannah Bowman
Co-Founder and Chief of People and Governance
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Hannah has spent the past 10 years working in charity, non-profit and social enterprise, starting her career in creative youth violence programmes on estates in London. Hannah has led on organisational operations, finance, governance, people and programme management for start-up organisations, and community interest companies Her focus has been on grassroots community engagement / building, safeguarding, cultural integrity and scaling, as well as senior-level policy and governance. Hannah ran the Art Against Knives Gallery CIC from 2014-2018, set up a women’s day centre in Peckham in 2019 and has trained in mental health first aid, and non-violent communication (NVC).
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As a child Hannah was a prolific creator, churning out drawings, paintings, clothes and ideas. As an adult this has flowed into the realm of ideas, intentional communication and creativity as tools for connection and social change. personal practices include collaging, sewing, singing and playing music in groups. Hannah is a trained hatha yoga teacher and permaculture designer. She loves bringing multi-disciplinary, ‘people and earth’ centred approaches to everything she does. She is passionate about the power of human creativity and ecological design principles in the development of essential emergent culture and economies.
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Beginning life in South East London, Hannah began working in communities with young people and women in schools and then grassroots community led projects. She has worked with organisations leading the development of long-term and enduring community spaces, from a studio for high risk young people in Finchley to an online membership model for a global platform developing community-based ecosystem restoration networks. Hannah considers herself a part of many divergent communities and is passionate about self-organisation, decentralisation and shifting power structures through the power of the collective through intentional gathering as well as the harnessing of organic connections between people.