Supporting Refugee Creative Entrepreneurship: An Examination of Experiences, Barriers, and Organisational Assistance in Birmingham's Arts Sector

This project will investigate the experiences, barriers, and support needs of refugees engaged with entrepreneurship in Birmingham's rich cultural sector to understand how third sector organisations (TSOs) can support refugees in the process of cultural integration and creative entrepreneurship.

By utilising cultural entrepreneurship perspectives, this research will explore how arts engagement offers resources conducive to the creation, implementation, and development of business ventures. It will examine how participation in the arts facilitates refugee access to entrepreneurial resources by implementing a research design that enables analysis of developmental pathways from cultural engagement to creative entrepreneurship, whilst demonstrating how TSOs have enriched cultural integration processes and enabled artistic development.

The project is co-designed by the Centre for Forced Displacement (CMFD), The Centre for Research in Ethnic and Minority Entrepreneurship (CRÈME) and Celebrating Sanctuary Birmingham (CBS). Celebrating Sanctuary is a music and arts organisation aiming to celebrate, support, and develop refugee and migrant artists by engaging refugees and asylum seekers through a variety of community projects.

Facilitated by a placement year within Celebrating Sanctuary, this co-designed project will utilise a longitudinal case study methodology comprising archival, interview, and observational data to map refugee cultural participation, skill acquisition, and entrepreneurial trajectory across time in Birmingham. Intervention plans will be tested, enabling Celebrating Sanctuary to undertake refugee creative entrepreneurship in practice, before evaluating its outcomes and efficacy.

This project will advance Celebrating Sanctuary's objective to improve cultural sector inclusion and diversity, whilst addressing key knowledge gaps emerging from a confluence between forced migration, cultural entrepreneurship, and creative industries research. Moreover, it will consider the utility and influence of refugee creative entrepreneurship intervention plans beyond cultural TSOs, by consulting with beneficiary communities and wider partners to understand the impact TSOs can have upon a diverse culture agenda within civil society.