Community Programmes

Dispatch Studios is building community programmes that address what the research keeps surfacing: skills gaps across the creative industries, knowledge not flowing between generations, and AI literacy that equips people to navigate the current transition with agency.

In 2025, Skills England reported that creative industries employers are struggling to find "creative and innovative thinking" itself.

Creativity research shows that creative thinking requires specific conditions to develop and thrive: time for incubation, freedom from surveillance, intrinsic motivation, and psychological safety. The programmes we're building are designed to support those conditions.

The approach is bottom-up. The research informs what we build, and the people who participate shape how it develops.

Cultural salons

Our cultural salons bring people together from across the creative industries for conversation that cuts across the usual silos. Creative workers, educators, researchers, policymakers, people working in different parts of the ecosystem who rarely have space to see how their experiences connect.

Each salon has an editorial focus drawn from the research. The format is intimate and the conversation is real. The gatherings surface stories and perspectives while building relationships across the system. Connections made often continue beyond the room.

What we're developing

Cross-generational knowledge exchange.

Mid-career professionals are leaving the creative industries in significant numbers. The Good Work Review estimated between 23,000 and 35,000 older workers have dropped out of film and TV alone. Skills England identifies the most acute gaps at mid-career and senior levels, exactly where craft knowledge and creative capacity should accumulate. Juniors are entering without foundational craft skills. Only one in ten freelancers receives any training. The knowledge that should flow between generations is being lost.

We're developing programmes that bring people at different career stages together. Young freelancers and the next generation of creative workers alongside experienced people who hold institutional knowledge. Learning happens through practice, with protected time for skills development and a range of experience levels creating the conditions for knowledge to transfer.

AI literacy.

The research identifies AI literacy as critically low across the creative industries, with current provision patchy and disconnected from how creative work actually happens.

AI literacy grounded in structural understanding is a different proposition. It equips people with the judgement and confidence to make their own decisions about how they use these tools. The research also generates intelligence about what AI tools the creative industries actually need: tools designed from an understanding of creative work rather than from technology company priorities.

Get involved

These programmes are developing. If you're a creative worker, educator, union organiser, or funder interested in what we're building, we'd like to hear from you. What are you seeing? What's needed? What would actually help?

If you'd like to participate in a survey about skills gaps and conditions in the creative industries, that's another way to contribute. Your experience feeds the research that shapes these programmes.

Email lara@dispatch-studios.com or use the Contact page.