Introductory Vibe Check
As with many things, T.S Eliot was wrong when he described April as the cruellest month: it’s January. Which is very nearly over. Hurrah!
Coming back to work after a break is probably the thing I find hardest about being freelance, especially if working from home at first. I can’t wait for the first days working with people again. It was even harder than usual this year as I had foolishly done my tax return in the summer, so missed my ritual for the last 15 years of wondering why I’d bought a terrible sandwich in some hard-knock Priority Place 18 months earlier. Sorry, I mean, “reflecting on my achievements before posting them on LinkedIn to shore up my fragile ego.”
This January has been particularly challenging due to a plethora of portents of collapse: Trump’s new term, this time backed by a series of mad oligarchs and kicking off with a series of horrific executive orders; atrocities in Gaza, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Sudan/West Darfur to name but three; the ongoing disappointments of our still relatively new government in the UK, hope ebbing away with each half-baked announcement or response.
If you were waiting for the government to say culture is “the ultimate force for change and national renewal” you can stop now. They said it, but about AI, smart enough to change the world, too stupid to understand copyright. (Since I first drafted that sentence they’ve added a turbocharged U-turn on the Third Runway at Heathrow, if you’ll forgive the unfortunate comedy car chase image that might create in your head.)
And the vital signs for the cultural sector where I do my work are increasingly looking, well, let’s say, sub-optimal. There are, as always some hooks to hang our hope on, breaks in the clouds such as Lisa Nandy’s announcement of funding for New Writing North’s Centre for Writing in Newcastle, and for Glassworks in Sunderland, though the latter has a slight ‘consolation’ aspect to it as it will keep glassmaking in Sunderland but likely not-really replace the National Glass Centre which will close.
Blueprint 2
I gained a lot of energy this month working with Arts & Business Northern Ireland’s second Blueprint programme, a fresh cohort of typically small-medium sized organisations looking for new ways to authentically fulfil and sustain their cultural and social purposes. (You can see who they are on Arts & Business Northern Ireland’s website.) This is especially challenging in Northern Ireland where funding to Arts Council Northern Ireland has reduced by 66% over the last 15 years (compared to 18% in England, 22% in Scotland and 25% in Wales) and where private giving and sponsorship face particular challenges.
I had worked with Arts & Business Northern Ireland on the Blueprint programme since 2022, including a lot of work with leaders of several organisations in the cohort. It’s been a brilliant experience for me to connect with cultural leaders who had been worked uphill, many of them for 25, 30 years or more. They taught me much about creative resilience for creative communities even as I shared some of my Tactics for the Tightrope. People have really grappled with how their organisation continue to evolve and develop, and to serve their communities, be that artists who need studio space, young people exploring their futures through writing or theatre, disabled artists and audiences, or specific parts of Belfast.
That a culture of shared purpose and values within individual organisations and within sectors and artforms in particular places and social contexts is the most powerful source of strength and resilience has been confirmed for me time and again. The commitment, creativity and good humour in this second cohort is clearly very similar, which bodes well.
The first Blueprint cohort seemed to benefit from time away from the demands of the day-to-day, and a structured programme to help them think through mission, models and money. They were able to review and redesign, knowing there would be some investment available to make the changes necessary.
This is where many ‘development programmes’ can fail: people reach the point where they know what must be done but lack access to the investment to actually do it, leading to what I’d call ‘teeth-gritting resilience’ at best. Investment without evolution can simply make the hamster wheel tolerable for a while. Evolution without investment can lead to frustration and cynicism. I’ve met some people through Blueprint who are frustrated at the status quo, but I don’t think I’ve met a cynic.
Scene Change
Blueprint was informed in its long design phase by the kind of work I did around resilience and the kind of arguments made by Mission Models Money in its heyday. Scene Change: Optimising Business Model Innovation in the Performing Arts is a new and significant report commissioned by the National Theatre jointly written by John Knell (who wrote for MMM), Eliza Easton, Amy Vaughan and Jordan Gibbs.
The report acknowledges MMM’s role in what it describes as “A 20-year diagnosis .. still waiting for a cure.” In many ways it picks up the baton I and others have tried to keep moving since MMM closed in 2014. Its analysis is up-to-date and seems to me to be powerful and accurate. There are also some really interesting breakdowns of business models in the performing arts, forming a typology which I will return to another time, as I want to concentrate on the recommendations before I close this post.
(Just as a side note that fragile ego I alluded to was pleased to see my original Making Adaptive Resilience Real paper for Arts Council and Tactics for the Tightrope in the bibliography. He (fragile egos all choose masculine pronouns, obv) still remembers the hostile reaction I got from someone at the National when doing my original research, who very firmly put me in my place, the one apparently marked ‘Somewhat Common Provincial Arts Bureaucrat To Whom I Need Not To Be Polite.’)
Blueprint is a good example of one of the recommendations to the report: an Arts Business Model Innovation Fund. As the recommendation describes it this would be “A two-stage innovation fund would enable arts organisations to generate new streams of revenue, providing seed and follow-on funding that would allow them to experiment with new sustainable and socially impactful business models.” There are other place-based and place-bounded examples of course, but anyone building on of these should talk to the team at ABNI. The impact of a UK-wide scheme could be huge. (I would add that independence from arts councils would be beneficial.)
Other recommendations include:
Connecting a new capital fund to the need for injections of philanthropic funding, with new tax breaks
Sector-authored playbooks on change – as the best of ACE’s IPSOs are already doing perhaps
An Urgent Stabilisation Fund – this would bring transparency to what gets saved and how, amongst other benefits
Tech adoption roadmaps and pro-bono advisor network
I hope this report will be heeded and encourage anyone in the performing arts and beyond to consider it, and build some of the thinking into your business modelling.
Other reading
There’s a lot in Scene Change in common with other recent interesting work that is all trying to solve the same cultural soduku: innovation, resilience, social impact, finance, income streams, governance, inclusion, workforce equity, well-being.
Culture Central recently published a Growth Enquiry Into The Future Of Cultural Investment In The West Midlands. This finds culture at a ‘crisis point’ and suggests ways forward towards cultural growth. These include negotiated long-term funding agreements and new fiscal interventions including a regional endowment for culture. This latter is especially interesting and may be a way to bring giving in through, for instance, regional community foundations.
Culture Commons’ report on The Future of Cultural Devolution in the UK coincided with announcement of the government’s white paper on devolution in England. The 30 partners in the Culture Commons project see great potential in devolution, though there is a welcome recognition of the role of local authorities, which I find lacking in the white paper.
Perhaps it’s because we’ve seen its, er, limitations here in the Tees Valley (Private Eye passim) but I’m not sure I share the enthusiasm for elected mayors overseeing more and more areas of life. It falls too much into Great Man/Put One Person in Charge thinking for me (even where the Man is a Woman, and great.) It may say devolution on the delivery note, but it is potentially a paradoxical concentration of power – in the mayor, and in central government signing off agreements.
This is not to say it does not bring opportunities that the cultural sector should grasp and contribute to, which are clearly set out here. Devolution has at least two sides, two faces – like Janus and January.
More soon, in the month that lasts only a week, February…
Tactics Tomato
Here’s a 25 minute pomodoro playlist of some of my favourite tracks from 2024. Enjoy while working then take a five minute break!