Culture Matters Co-operative is a collective of writers, artists and activists who work together to promote cultural democracy. Culture includes all learned human activities, including the arts like literature, film, theatre, music etc. but also sport, the media, eating and drinking, and religion.
For us, culture matters! It is a vital and fundamental part of human life, bringing us all kinds of entertainment, enlightenment and enjoyment. So the various ways in which cultural activities and experiences are created, distributed and consumed are essential for human development, wellbeing and happiness.
Cultural experiences in class-divided societies like ours are often compromised and commercialised, twisted and manipulated to serve the need for dominant classes to justify and maintain their exploitative and oppressive social structures. We want to see culture democratised – owned, managed and enjoyed by working people, so that we have full and fair access to all kinds of cultural experiences.
We work to promote cultural democracy in several ways. We run this website, which publishes creative and critical material to reflect our mission. We publish books – mostly poetry, short stories and children’s books – and have so far published around 50 titles, including books by award-winning poets like Fran Lock, Fred Voss, Martin Hayes, Jane Burn and others.
Together with trade unions, we also run the annual Bread and Roses Poetry Award, which seeks to encourage and support new working-class writers of poetry. And we also work with trade unions to support the cultural education of their members, and to campaign for better representation of the labour movement on relevant cultural decision-making bodies.
Our current team of Associate Editors and support staff is as follows: Jim Aitken, Attila Ajtai, Dennis Broe, Jenny Farrell, Sally Flint, Martin Gollan, Judith Gordon, Gillian Grant, Brett Gregory, Gemma June Howell, Michael Jarvie, Mike Jenkins, Fran Lock, Rebecca Lowe, Alan Morrison, Mike Quille and Ben Stevenson.
