Organisational closures
Barely a day goes by, it seems, without news of another good cultural organisation deciding to close. A person could become anxious if it weren’t for developments such as the one at Theatre Hullabaloo I described last week.
Curious Monkey, one of North East England’s most respected theatre companies, a decade old, well-run and breaking fresh ground in its work with asylum seekers and refugees as the region’s first Theatre Company of Sanctuary, recently announced it will close next year. Having been unsuccessful in their last NPO bid, founders Amy Golding and Jenny Dewar and their board have decided to, as they put it, “wrap the company up with care and careful consideration for our staff, partners and the communities we work with.”
Last week saw similar news from two larger organisations with strategic roles: Cornwall Museums Partnership and Creative and Cultural Skills. The statement from CCSkills has clear hints of something more than disappointment: “The last few years have been challenging, as they have been for many organisations, and we have not been able to secure the funds needed to continue despite assurances from Arts Councils across the UK that our work is vital.”
The need is, as the statement suggests, clearly ongoing, but funding is not. One can’t help but think an organisation rather similar to CCSkills is likely to be invented in the future, or its roles subsumed by a funded-body set up for related but different reasons or contexts. But for now, I suspect to not even the funders’ satisfaction, another one bites the dust. (I really hope the information and data CCSkills hold finds a good home.)
These are just three examples that have caught my attention in the last few weeks, there are others, and losses in the less-subsidised parts of the sector such as grassroots music venues too. (My sympathies obviously go out to everyone directly involved: the close down process is the very opposite of creative.) They demonstrate something which the Cornwall Museums Partnership put very clearly in their statement: for them, as for others, “a new operating model does not exist within the current challenging funding climate”.
A crisis brewing beyond individual instances?
This suggests a crisis brewing or already here beyond individual instances. We have grown accustomed to a subsidised cultural sector which has developed talent and reach for many years, in which both project and core funded organisations were able to develop, experiment, grow and create vaguely coherent artform and sector development, which in turn generated a workforce (including artists), audiences and social applications. They worked alongside each other, moving and hybridising at times but the mix enabled many of the strengths of the sector, not least innovative and inclusive new models in times of growth.
If project funding alongside regular funding becomes insufficient to sustain this mix, what are the likely implications?
Wearing the black hat for a moment – there’s another more optimistic ‘asset-based’ view for another day on the positive elements of a reset - one can envisage a future where new companies are unable to flourish unless they hit the NPO (or equivalent) jackpot early. Many founders will be forced to operate in the ‘vulnerable dependent’ and ‘frustrated innovation’ quadrants of creative resilience for more of their time. More will grow exhausted before they are able to reach core-funded status. (Not that such funding is necessarily the panacea it might seem.)
Talent will leach out of the sector – either into unrelated jobs or into more commercial parts of the sector. The disadvantages faced by those without family resources to subsidise them will be exacerbated, and new entrants deterred, reducing diversity and representation in the workforce still further. Audiences may become seen more as cash cows than co-creators.
We will see shrinkage in the cultural sector – perhaps a major one. Some might see this as a good thing culturally – there may be ‘enough’ culture to go around anyway. Others would see it as a version of what has happened to high streets in many towns: continued but diminished creative life. The major centres and the equivalents of the out of town centres will hold on to their buzz. The innovators’ lifespan will shorten as the burnout rate increases. This will happen without creating significant space for new ideas to come in, the main potential upside of organisations closing, in theory at least.
Let me find some straws to clutch at before closing.
The adaptive cycle
What we are seeing is, I think, an example of the adaptive cycle in action, at a sectoral level. If enough organisations enter the release phase at the same time – there is a related epidemic of artistic directors leaving their roles in major theatres, for instance – the system may start to tip so that the reorganisation phase is either distorted, or –potentially more positively – becomes a leap into a new system. This may have greater or lesser degrees of chaos inherent.
The adaptive cycle gives you a framework for thinking about resources and connectedness. How does money flow into creative organisation and strategic bodies alike in a way that allows for diversity? Would a Creativity Bank help generate new models of income and value creation, as recently argued by Caroline Norbury of Creative UK? Or does it become even more the norm that funding bodies effectively choose which organisations are needed? (This is not an English phenomenon, either, one can see it in the recent case made by Creative Scotland to the Scottish Government, for example.) A greater acknowledgement all round of the central enabling function of regular core funding, something the sector has arguably moved away from with the necessary, and often helpful, move to diversify revenue sources, would be helpful.
This does not mean an end to thinking about sustainability and resilience, an acceptance of vulnerable dependence, but calls for reimagining how the elements can work, with greater focus at a sectoral level. There are clear implications for future national portfolio processes, for transition funding, and for lottery project funding, which is currently a hugely inefficient way of supporting ideas and needs. (So many reapplications and re-assessments!) How individuals are affected by these changes requires more attention than I can give it here but is clearly an important area for policy-makers.
There is also a need to rethink how to provide for those elements and functions which allow for the balanced operation of the cultural ecosystem. What we see currently is periodic reinvention of organisations working at sector level, often in an attempt to rebalance or redesign unintended or unhealthy results of the current ecosystem. This may have some benefits: ‘new entrants’ such as Centre for Cultural Value and PEC bring new partnerships and perspectives. It also risks babies being lost in bath water or wasteful tinkering.
In England we’ve seen some organisations reframed – from ‘sector support organisations’ to ‘Investment Principles support organisations’. These are fundamentally different frames which suggests a more funder-target-centric orientation. The necessary debates in the release and reorganisation phase should be used to explore a more sector-driven design (including input by artists and freelancers).
Out of anxiety
Meantime, we also need to manage the anxiety news of closures can breed, of which this post may be an example. One way to break out of anxiety to avoid stress is to focus on something positive. We should, of course, also remember the things that do get done, so brilliantly, with support from funders, partners, audiences and communities. (But do not forget the other stuff - just read Smile or Die by Barbara Ehrenreich and it will put you off toxic positivity for life…)
Today’s example is a major grant from ACE to Sunderland Culture and partners. This will see a large scale programme focussed on children’s access to culture, especially those living in poverty – which children in Sunderland are more likely to be doing than those in other parts of the country. I can’t help comparing the scale of budget and ambition of programmes like Creative Partnerships in the past with what we now think of as a big grant, but I am still taking this as a positive.
Onwards…