Fellowship reflections 1: Big plans and difficult questions

In this article Culture for Climate Scotland’s culture/SHIFT Manager, Lewis Coenen-Rowe, reflects on the beginning stages of his Alliance for Socially Engaged Arts fellowship, which runs until November 2026.

Embarking on the fellowship alongside a group of 14 fascinating practitioners from all around Europe has been an exciting and challenging process. The programme provides time and resources to learn, think and develop ideas for how we can improve and develop Culture for Climate Scotland’s work.

The fellowship time is split between developmental work around four key themes – holistic leadership, storytelling, evaluation and advocacy – combined with time to explore a more specific leading question for the organisation. For me, this question is concerned with developing better class and poverty informed approaches to arts-based work on climate change.

The Alliance for Socially Engaged Arts fellows at the Turin residency. Photography by Andrea Guermani

Why class and poverty?

As two separate but intersecting issues, understanding class and poverty is vital for developing just and fair responses to climate change and for finding the right roles for the arts within this.

We know that working class people are underrepresented among both cultural and environmental professionals. Working class people and people living on low incomes are less likely to shape climate change decision making, but are often more affected by climate change-related impacts. Class dynamics in Scotland have been shaped by industrial transitions out of coal and heavy industry, which we need to learn from to develop a truly just transition now.

These subjects have regularly come up through our work at Culture for Climate Scotland, but I don’t think we have yet been able to develop effective ways to respond to them. I know that others working in the arts and culture sector, and poverty reduction and environmental fields, are facing similar questions and developing solutions of their own. I want to use the time in this fellowship to learn from others, share their expertise more widely, find new methods and develop a network of people working in this area.

Some difficult questions

I have loved learning from the other fellows, who are working in a wide range of different contexts, and bring expertise on areas ranging from migrant justice, to non-hierarchical ways of working, to spatial justice. As part of the fellowship I travelled to Turin in October 2025 for an immersive residential to learn and develop our practice., This provided an opportunity for us to spend five intense days together where I was amazed to learn about the things the other fellows are doing. Some key questions that came out of this for me included:

• How do we find the right speed? Addressing climate change is urgent and the longer we delay action, the worse the effects will be. We need to be moving much faster. At the same time, much of the work we do is slow. It is about building trust, relationships and confidence. I’ve seen how moving before public support is established leads to backlash that ultimately delays climate action.
• What are the routes to change? There’s a balance to be struck between work that seeks to empower people to take action themselves and work that helps them influence people in decision-making roles. If we only do the former, it’s unfair. We can’t expect people to resolve all issues by themselves. If we only do the latter, it’s disempowering. We’re essentially saying people’s only role is to try and be heard by those who have the real power. How do we strike the right balance between top down and bottom up theories of change?
• Should we work more internationally? People from other countries have expressed their disappointment that there is not an equivalent organisation to ours where they are based. There is a lot of interest in our work that could lead to international collaboration. But, should we be pursuing this at the risk of diluting the work we are already doing? How can we support culture-based climate action in other countries without diverting our attention from what we already do?
• How do the different parts of Culture for Climate Scotland interact? Unlike most of the organisations on this fellowship, we are not purely a socially engaged arts organisation. Our culture/SHIFT team does this work, but the Green Arts team is more focused on empowering the arts and culture sector to respond effectively to climate change. Is the division between these teams helpful and should we be doing more work that crosses this divide?

I’ll be trying to, at least partially, respond to these questions over the course of the fellowship.

The Alliance for Socially Engaged Arts fellows at the Turin residency. Photography by Andrea Guermani

What’s next?

Over the coming months, I will be working with artist Frank McElhinney on Thriving Tomorrow, a pilot project with ex-mining communities in the Northern Corridor of North Lanarkshire, running a Europe-wide online discussion group for people working at the intersections of climate, class, coal and culture, running workshops with the Culture for Climate Scotland team, going on study visits and participating in a further residential with the other fellows in Sofia.

I will publish another reflection later in the year to update on what I have learned from these experiences.

If you would like to speak further about the fellowship and the things I am working on, please get in touch at [email protected].

Header image: The Alliance for Socially Engaged Arts fellows at the Turin residency. Photography by Andrea Guermani