Pain is coming, nobody doubts it. Many of Experience My Culture users work for public services or not-for-profit organisations and are waiting with trepidation for the axe to fall.

But how often do you come across someone working in a similar way to you but getting more for their money or using the same resources you have in a more creative and enjoyable way? That's certainly my experience. I wish I had £5 for the number of times I've met someone and found myself saying "I wish I'd known you two years ago when I was planning..." (actually those fivers would come in handy themselves).

This last week we've  been asking people for their suggestions for groups they'd like to see on Experience My Culture, not just out of an interest in people's interests, but to spark conversations across our site.

I was reminded of my own childhood: before we could afford a washing machine my Grandma did our laundry once a week at the communal washhouse. She didn't just return with clean clothes though she came back with information -  gossip, if you like - but among the tittle tattle were baking tips, hints on who sold sugar cheapest and many more things she benefitted from.

I was fascinated this week by a Scottish project to create a community bakehouse in North Howe. The their want to create a local bakery but also somewhere for people to make their own food and learn from each other. I'll bet the bread will be economical and give nourishment far beyond the simple act of eating a sandwich.

And in terms of budgetary cuts how better to cooperate with others to learn newer more efficient ways of doing something, or just simply realise that someone's doing exactly what you are and enable you both to work collaboratively.

Whether it's laundry, bread, art or music you share, you will generally come away with more than you brought!

That is the ethos of Experience My Culture.

Here's a few things that have caught our eye this week.

We've been tweeting the resurrgence of Manchester's favourite new-old music venue The Band on the Wall, and are delighted to be able to trumpet the triumphant return of this back-street eclectically minded music venue. Take a look at their website here, and register for great exclusive concert videos.

On Thursday Transglobal Underground gigged at Band on the Wall with their UNITE project - if you've not heard their culture-crossing blend of electronica and world music, we recommend the video we've just linked to on You Tube.

In similar vein World Routes on BBC Radio 3 featured world music giant Toumani Diabate in concert at the Barbican last week in a stunning tribute to the late Ali Farke Toure. Radio 3 has a well established pedigree on World Music, try Late Junction for an eclectic mix, as well as listening to the more obviously titled World Route.  You can listen again here to the superb kora player Toumani Diabate

Nearer home we were struck by this video uploaded to Experience My Culture by Sylvan the Journey man.  His blog the Parkour  Gerneration started out with a simple visit to a local park watching local young people 'getting around' the children's equipment. Later, researching the skills of Parkour, he came across this video, you will be impressed!

Keep the good stuff coming!

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We were in Saddleworth with our friends Zen Comms and Crofty on Friday for a cultural event that was new to us but has been going on since the 1800s. Whit Friday is traditionally the day when Yorkshire Christian people celebrate Pentecost, each church processing with a brass band at the head.

In Saddleworth this developed from the morning's processions to a highly competitive brass band contest in each of the region's villages, with bands travelling from village to village to be judged by a hidden brass band expert as they played their test piece.

We were at Greenfield contest where Crofty explained the intricacies of the brass band world – and they take it very seriously, the learned audience gathered on the grass were never rude to bands that were under par, but their applause for the really good ones demonstrated their musical erudition. A clapometer would have truly delivered the same results as the clever chap hidden away in the caravan.

We loved this event: the streets teemed with families and a wide range of people, some enjoying the technical aspects of the brass world, others simply revelling in the fantastic noise of a marching, smartly uniformed brass band.

We'll certainly be going there again, join us next time: June 17^th 2011.

Let us know if you have a festival near you that's a well kept secret, write us a blog post to tell us all about and maybe we'll come along and experience your culture!  

Find out more, get the contest results and see more pictures at www.whitfriday.brassbands.saddleworth.org

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The summer festival season is here and we kicked our summer off with a visit to the Shepley Spring Festival last night. Although predominantly a folk/roots music festival it's amazing how even, what is ostensibly a thin slice of the musical world, reflects the complexities of the interweaving of culture.

The range of tunes and styles purporting to be representative of the current British folk scene demonstrates how our native culture continues to be a fantastic melange of ours and other nations' history.

Certainly this festival was a mirror of what Experience My Culture is about: rooted in our own individual culture and ready to take on and enrich our experiences by sharing with as many other people as possible.

The festival is on all this weekend so you've still time to check out more of the the great acts, more details here: http://www.shepleyspringfestival.com/

Let us know how you enrich your culture this summer, particularly if you are going to a festival or event. We'll be out and about again next Friday at the Saddleworth Whit Friday Brass Band Contest. Think Brass Bands are naff? Think again, this is a superb day out with roots in the boom years of the Lancashire and Yorkshire cotton and wool industry.

Find out more about Whit Friday here: http://www.whitfriday.brassbands.saddleworth.org/

If you are short of a festival to try, this is a fairly expansive list: http://www.thefestivalcalendar.co.uk/

Let us know where you go and how you enrich your summer!

Passing the time of day with the lad on the till last Saturday in our regular superket, we chatted about how he had changed his hours to accomodate his new other paid job as a youth worker. He was proud of having secured this job because it was with an organisation he'd been doing voluntary work with for some time, combining it with his university course.

He lives and works about three miles from me, his parents are about my age and, like me were born and raised in my home town. One of his grandparents worked in a textile mill, like mine. We had a lot in common.

We then started chatting about how he was hoping to get a group of young people on the Duke of Edinburgh Awards scheme, again we chatted for a while about this, I am familiar with the scheme: my scout group did it, and people at my school and my sons' school did the DofE, as it was affectionately known.

Then came the learning.

He went on to tell me how none of the kids he worked with had ever heard of the scheme until he introduced them to it, none of them had ever been exposed to the activities available through the scheme. Nor had he nor his parents heard of the scheme until he went to university. They live just down the road from me, how could they not know about the DofE?

But they didn't go to the same places of worship as me, they went to different schools (with smaller budgets) and their community didn't have conversations that took in the Royal Family (of course they'd never heard of the Prince's Trust either).

Just then the check-out supervisor started to hover around my till, she obviously thought I spent my Saturday mornings socialising with her employees, deliberately slowing down the efficiency of her store. So I didn't get the chance to tell him about this new exciting cultural sharing site where people can share experiences, hobbies, or whatever contributes to their culture - and learn from each other.

I'll be back at the same till next Saturday, and the Saturday after for as long as it takes to tell him about Experience My Culture!

If you follow us on Twitter you'll already know how we search out interesting cultural highlights each week and tweet them for you; but it occurred to us this week that some of you don't know what you are missing, and also there's such a lot of good stuff out there it's easy to miss out.

So, here are our highlights - entirely subjectively - for this last week.

Bravery Of Arab Idol:

This story captured our attention as Burqa-clad Hissa Hilal blasted clerics as "vicious in voice, barbaric, angry and blind," during the Arabic version of 'American Idol', that differs from the pop music show in that contestants recite traditional style poetry. Read more here...

Indian Reservation Suicides

The New York Times features the story of suicide young men on the Rosebud Sioux reservation. This story mirrors similar worrying suicides among indigenous young men in other cultures across the world, for example Maori and Australian Aboriginal cultures. You can read the whole story here:

Indian Hill Railways

This has been a stunningly beautiful journey through Northern India's Himalayan regions on quirky, nostalgic, and deeply loved steam railways that have served communities in remote regions since the days of Empire. You have a few days left to catch the most recent on the i-Player here:

Ravi Shankar Sitar Hero                                                                                                               

Ravi Shankar might have set off as a classical Sitarist that the

world may never have heard of but in his ninetieth year he can reflect on a life that has seen him cross cultures taking in people like the Beatles in his wake. This BBC Radio 4 Programme is available for a few days more.

This is only a very quick snippet of the things we tweet every day, follow us as @expmyculture to keep up to date with the wealth of material we find that takes in everything from politics to race to art to music to food...

And don't forget, you can use Twitter to search for the cultural subjects you are interested in: put @expmyculture plus your chosen subject in the search field, to find what we already found for you!

Who changes bad culture? 

I pose the question on the back of growing political clamouring for action to 
tackle ‘broken-Britain’, and this weeks throwing of a gauntlet to the Police on 
anti-social behaviour.

Then came the story of David Askew, the
learning disabled Manchester man
allegedly taunted for years who apparently
dropped down dead as the result.

Listening to an interview with his
neighbour Lynn Barber I reflected on how in
that small community, the taunting had
become so much a part of local culture –
for those engaged in it – that it passed
down through three generations of
children and young adults as normal and
acceptable behaviour.

It had become a local pastime described in
 one newspaper as like ‘bear-baiting’.

How does that happen?


Our town-centre binge drinking youngsters - our sons and daughters - are
castigated as a symptom of ‘broken Britain’.

We worry about their safety yet they are not dissuaded from binge-drinking by
price hikes nor bans on drink-as-much-as-you-can offers. They are merely
irritated at barriers to their culturally normal activities – binge drinking is
what they do.

This drinking until stupefied is not limited to western culture – many
aboriginal cultures use a range of intoxicants to get themselves 'off their
faces'.

None of us believe that the hate crime perpetrated against David Askew is an
acceptable culture. Many of us beliee binge drinking and its inherent
disorderly behaviour are ultimately not healthy for society.

The arguments for change of culture are consistently related to crime or health
coupled with the economic argument (cost to the NHS for example) being a
secondary supportive one.

So who or what influences cultural change?

In the coming weeks there will be blame laid in many places in the case of David
Askew, but one thing is clear. Children and young adults will consider
themselves to have been 'having a laugh' or 'just messing about' and ASBOs nor
prosecution will not make them understand.

There are probably dozens of fantastic community groups on Hattersley estate
where David lived, genuinely appalled wondering how this happened.

Some may have been working with children and young people involved.

Individually the effect of messages they give on any subject from anti-social
behaviour to hate crime is limited. Together with a shared understanding of what
that communities problems are there is a chance of making a difference.

We think Experience My Culture could be a place to meet and have those
conversations.

You've probably guessed that the Experience My Culture team are passionate about how we see the 'new' culture emerging from multi-culturalism, and how we think that much of the work done around forcing a multi-culturalist view on people, whilst well meaning, doesn't work.

People are far more sophisticated than that aren't they? Well, we are each unique aren't we - and each of us has our own take on the broader cultural themes that run through society. How many times have you shouted at the TV, when someone has been representing a cultural view on your behalf, "Don't presume to speak for me - I don't think like that!" (To be swifty followed up by your significant other pointing out that the people on the telly can't actually hear you shouting).

Similarly the other meaning of the word culture - art, literature, food and music - is equally as frustratingly boxed off by people telling us how we should like our art. When in reality, culture in this context  is - or should be - simply an expression of culture in the other context.

I came across Tanya Raabe the other week when she painted in public at Tate Modern, I Tweeted her blog post about the experience because I loved her take on painting, art, her own personal culture and the relationship between the painter and the person being painted.

Have a look at her blog and the pictures on Flickr of her work, you'll see what I mean.

There are those among us who actively promote the social health and welfare of our communities, people who have little or no interest in financial gain or the desire to be centre of attention. Such individuals often lose themselves in the altruistic desire to develop and or maintain a system that serves to reinforce the very fiber of society at a microscopic and rudimentary level. I refer to the local social enterprise that more often that not begins as a direct result of a local need, a need to provide local children with a place to congregate; the coffee morning for senior citizens that prevents older people in our local communities becoming isolated, groups for: young parents, women, disabled people, the list, although not endless, is comprehensive. These groups are often duplicated in towns and cities all over the country, each existing as a single strand.

These services are more often than not run exclusively by volunteers, people who have identified a need within their local community and are not afraid to respond to that need by investing their own time and energy for little or no financial reward.  

So the question that we pose is this. What would happen if these groups began sharing? Sharing the odd greeting, information about who they are and what it is that they are trying to achieve in their all local area. Advice on how they applied for funding or the hurdles and or successes the achieved when they first started out.  

Part of the answer is that these individual strands would come together to form a stronger fabric that lends itself, not only to a wider support mechanism, but a source of information and learning that serves the local and wider community by seeking to develop ties between these groups. Not just by knowing about each other but by talking and visiting one another and actively taking time to consider the things we have in common. Regardless of where in the country we may live.

We invite you to come and share the details of your social enterprise with us. Create an account (It's all free of charge), submit your profile and let’s get to know each other, let’s share.

We love Twitter, not least because of all the new social media it's the one that has captured the creative imagination of people more than any other. Whether you use Twitter purely as a social medium to keep up to date with mates, or whether you use it as a search engine, or the place to go for your news, you cannot deny its versatility.

We love Twitter because it means that we can reach out to people and show them what Experience My Culture is about, but also we can source and share the latest in a wide range of culturally interesting news with you, our users.

We believe that culture - art, food, music, literature, craft - is inseperable from our own individual culture; in fact culture is simply an expression of our culture, if you see what we mean.

Every day we scour the world's media (do you know how much that is?!), to find the most interesting news and features about culture, and of course culture.

So if you don't have a Twitter account get one here and follow us, we are @expmyculture .