Intercultural Arts is an "infrastructure organisation": we provide services to support individual artists, organisations, groups and companies. The organisation has a region-wide remit coordinated by two permanent staff and freelancers working under contract to deliver strategic development projects.

A Board of Trustees of up to 15 people oversees the governance and direction of the organisation, its members come from a variety of backgrounds and are committed to developing intercultural arts in North East England.

The organisation grew out of several different associations for minority ethnic communities in North East England. The aim was to identify shared priorities and to coordinate demands and responses from funders, venues and other artists, to establish a professional presence for minority ethnic artists in our region.

We aim to serve artists who wish to work interculturally; to share their experiences and traditions with people who may not have experienced them before. We work to raise the profiles of individual artists and of intercultural art itself. We try to broker relationships between artists and venues and to help them to access funding and other support. We promote opportunities for collaboration and for artists to participate in active networks to achieve practical goals.

We are a Regularly Funded Organisation of Arts Council England North East to facilitate strategic services in support of professional intercultural artists in the region. We aim to deliver a sustainable infrastructure for the development of intercultural arts in North East England and to provide practical services to artists from other countries who live and work in North East England. We act as a bridge between minority ethnic artists and the mainstream arts and cultural sectors.

"Wor Poets" is a project developed by Intercultural Arts to raise the profile of poets from different countries who live and work in North East England.

We take performance poetry to communities in community centre where we offer follow-up creative writing workshops and later we invite those new audiences to 'mainstream' venues where they can meet people from other local communities as well as those who regularly attend poetry events.

There has already been significant interest in Wor Poets! and there are a number of opportunities for performance.  We're keen to identify as many individuals from minority ethnic communities who perform their poetry publicly and to invite them to join the project.