A recent discussion paper from Culture Commons offers a compelling account of how the creative, cultural, and heritage sectors are adapting to the shifting terrain of UK devolution. As combined authorities evolve and take on more responsibilities, there is a growing recognition that culture plays a vital role in shaping place, identity, and civic purpose. Yet while this paper presents a rich and necessary analysis of how cultural investment and decision-making could and should move closer to communities, it also prompts a vital question: who is missing from the picture?
The report, Review of Devolution and the UK’s Creative, Cultural and Heritage Ecosystem, explores how the current model of cultural governance—centralised, institutional, and administratively fragmented—is poorly aligned with the everyday experience of culture as it is lived. It rightly draws attention to the imbalances in public investment across regions, the precarious position of local authorities as cultural funders, and the potential for mayoralties and combined authorities to become more intentional in their cultural leadership. This is an important and timely conversation. But we must ensure it is not one that overlooks the quieter, often overlooked actors in the civic infrastructure: the community media organisations, volunteers, practitioners and listeners who are already sustaining meaningful engagement across their localities.
If we are to take seriously the claim that culture must be rooted in place, and that devolution should be a process of enabling local stewardship and democratic participation, then community media must be seen not as a marginal or secondary activity, but as part of the core civic infrastructure of everyday life. We do not need to invent new mechanisms to localise culture—we simply need to recognise and value the ones that are already in use.
Community media exists not as a commodity to be packaged and delivered, but as a lived practice of storytelling, listening, care, and connection. Its value is realised through the process of participation, where media is not made for communities, but with them. It is a form of social infrastructure that is inherently dialogic—rooted in the places people call home, and reflective of the needs, identities, and aspirations that are shaped there. When we talk about decentralising culture, it is this kind of horizontal, relational communication that must come to the fore.
In this respect, community media aligns closely with the principles of Foundational Economics. Rather than treating communication as a high-growth, extractive industry driven by commercial metrics and consolidated power, we must reposition communication as a foundational service—essential to the wellbeing, resilience, and democratic participation of communities. Like schools, libraries, GP surgeries, adult learning centres and local theatres, community media provides something that is not easily measured in units or KPIs. It provides a space in which people can develop trust, express identity, share care, and build a sense of agency. It gives citizens tools to make sense of the world around them, and to shape the stories that are told about their communities.
It is in this capacity that community media should be recognised as a peer-group activity alongside other civic institutions. Not as an auxiliary service to be parachuted in when needed, but as an enduring part of the social fabric—where care, creativity, and connection are cultivated in ways that support both individual capability and collective wellbeing. These are not transactional encounters. They are regenerative ones. In a time when so many systems and structures are under pressure, when trust is depleted and civic life feels distant, community media offers an approach to communication that does not extract value from attention, but nurtures value through attention.
To include community media in the evolving cultural policy framework means to rethink what cultural infrastructure really looks like. It means recognising that culture does not only emerge from funded institutions or prestige programmes, but from the ordinary spaces where people share stories, produce radio shows, record podcasts, run media workshops, and maintain the rhythms of local connection. It means treating these spaces with the same seriousness we afford to the rest of our social infrastructure. If a public library is a space for shared knowledge, then community radio is a space for shared voice. If adult education fosters lifelong learning, then community media fosters lifelong dialogue.
The Culture Commons report takes important steps toward understanding the spatial and institutional dynamics of cultural investment. But as we continue this conversation, we must ensure that the forms of media that are most embedded in community life—and most aligned with democratic and regenerative values—are not left out. Community media already operates at the intersection of social need and local capacity. It already demonstrates what devolution could look like when people are given the tools to care for their neighbourhoods, families, and communities.
The next phase of cultural devolution must be one that includes and amplifies this work. Not only because it is the right thing to do—but because it is already happening, and it is already making a difference.