Values and vision

Objectives

London 2012 will integrate the cultural aspects of the Olympic Games and Paralympic Games into a single cultural programme, while taking the opportunity to showcase the increasingly vibrant disability arts movement.

It will:

• inspire and involve the widest range of London and UK-wide communities;
• generate sustainable long-term benefits to our cultural life;
• create outstanding moments of creative excellence across the full range of performing arts and creative industries;
• connect future generations with the UK’s artistic communities and with their peers around the world;
• promote contemporary London as a major world cultural capital;
• drive tourism and inward investment and use the creative industries to boost economic regeneration; and
• embrace the Olympic movement values of ‘excellence, respect and friendship’ and the Paralympic movement vision to ‘empower, achieve, inspire’.
  

Our values

The Cultural Olympiad is for everyone. It will:

• celebrate London and the whole of the UK welcoming the world – our unique internationalism, cultural diversity, sharing and understanding;
• inspire and involve young people; and
• generate a positive legacy – for example through cultural and sports participation, audience development, cultural skills, capacity building, urban regeneration, tourism and social cohesion and international links.
  

Our themes

The Cultural Olympiad will also reflect and support a number of themes. It will:

• bring together culture and sport;
• encourage audiences to take part;
• animate and humanise public spaces – through street theatre, public art, circus skills, live big screen sites;
• use culture and sport to raise issues of environmental sustainability, health and well-being;
• honour and share the values of the Olympic and Paralympic Games;
• ignite cutting edge collaborations and innovation between communities and cultural sectors; and
• enhance the learning, skills and personal development of young people by linking with our education programmes.

These values and themes emerged from our discussions with the arts and cultural sector.

We expect that every project in the Cultural Olympiad will have to fully display the first three core values and adopt at least three of the themes.

Not only will this help us to meet the big goals for the Cultural Olympiad, but this approach also aims to ensure there is purpose, character and identity to the London 2012 culture programme.

After the Games

The Olympic Games and Paralympic Games will leave a powerful cultural legacy across the UK.

The Cultural Olympiad will create a buzz around the UK that will last long after the Flame is extinguished at the Closing Ceremony of the Paralympic Games, on 9 September 2012.

The benefits that the Cultural Olympiad will hope to bring are:

• a new awareness of cultural activity around the whole of the UK;
• new ways to get involved, new projects to get involved in;
• more people taking part in cultural activity within their local community; and
• new partnerships in the cultural sector and around the world.