NewcastleGateshead Cultural Venues (NGCV) is an alliance of ten North East building-based producers and presenters representing most cultural forms and operating 22 venues.

Together each year we have over 4.3m attendances at our cultural activities and over a million engagements in learning and participation, including 700,000 children and young people.  We are also active and influential regionally, nationally and internationally.

• BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art
• International Centre for Life
• Dance City
• Live Theatre
• Northern Stage
• Seven Stories
• Theatre Royal
• The Sage Gateshead
• Tyne & Wear Archives & Museums
• Tyneside Cinema

We work together to maximise the artistic and economic potential of the cultural sector in the North East. We achieve this by developing strategic and creative initiatives, sharing practice and resources and by being a strong collective voice.

After a decade of informal joint working to 2009, we now have an extensive partnership which is deeply embedded across and within all the organisations.  We share a collective desire to investigate new models of sustainability, as well as explore the advantages of working together to develop audiences and new activities.

Initially supported by the national Mission the Missions Money programme of action research into collaborative working, we have been supported by Arts Council England and by the organisations’ significant contributions of money, time and expertise.  We also work closely with Newcastle and Gateshead Councils and other key partners.

We explore ways to become more efficient, more cost-effective, better informed about each other and the external landscape in which we operate, better placed to use our shared resources, better able to measure and demonstrate our collective value and better placed to engage with audiences and new technologies. This in turn makes us a more credible voice in representing the case for continued investment in culture and to gain maximum value from all the investment of the past decade.

To our knowledge, the extent of this collaboration is unmatched in the UK and is already being shared as a model nationally.  We are keen to share learning and benefits across the cultural sector and work with others wherever possible.

Staff enthusiasm, commitment and energy has been critical in our successes to date and we are continually seeking new ways to engage, inform and enable staff to work together.