Cultural Playing Field

On Thursday I was in London to meet Stuart Etherington, Chief Executive of NCVO. Stuart is working on developing NCVO’s civil society agenda and is having a series of one-to-one meetings with organisations representing independent schools, co-operatives, housing associations, trade unions, universities etc. Having discussed the role of sports clubs in civil society with Tim Lamb from the Central Council for Physical Recreation, he was keen to have a similar conversation with me about voluntary arts groups. This fits well with VAN’s own vision of “an empowered, participative, fulfilled and healthy civil society” and  it was great to hear that Stuart sees the voluntary arts as a key component of civil society. It will be interesting to see how far NCVO can take the idea of a more collaborative approach to developing civil society in the period leading up to the next general election.

On Thursday I was at Community Matters in London for a meeting about the new ‘Leadership & Governance’ National Support Service. This programme – funded by Capacitybuilders as one of the replacements for the old ChangeUp national Hubs – is a partnership between NCVO, acevo and the Community Sector Coalition. The meeting I attended was an opportunity for Coalition members to help to plan the parts of the programme which will be delivered by the CSC. The emphasis for the programme (as for the all the national support services) is to help ‘Support Providers’ (including local infrastructure organisations and national membership bodies such as voluntary arts umbrella organisations) to deliver capacity-building to local front-line organisations. In the case of the Leadership & Governance support service there will be a particular focus on small community groups – including voluntary arts groups. The old Governance Hub was very helpful to VAN and enabled us to deliver a programme of governance support to voluntary arts umbrella bodies. It looks like there should be even more potential to improve leadership and governance in local voluntary arts groups through the new national support service.

On Tuesday I was at Highgate House in Creaton, Northamptonshire for the annual NCVO Board awayday. There was much discussion of the Conservative Party green paper on the role of the third sector which had just been released and which includes several proposals that NCVO had been pushing for (changing the Office of the Third Sector to an Office for Civil Society, establishing a select committee for the sector etc). As well as the usual business, the Board meeting looked in detail at NCVO’s environmental performance. You can see details of progress on YouTube at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JiHnvpY8WkA

I was in London again on Tuesday to meet Richard Piper and Jake Eliot from the Performance team at NCVO. We had a fascinating and wide-ranging discussion about performance, effectiveness and impact in the voluntary arts. Richard was keen to explore the application of NCVO’s ‘Full Value’ model (see www.performancehub.org.uk/fullvalue) in a voluntary arts context. We talked in detail about the forthcoming government seminar on excellence and the voluntary arts (on 4 June) and looked at examples and learning from the wider voluntary and community sector that might prove helpful to this debate.

At my regular meeting with our informal voluntary cultural sector alliance partners Heritage Link and the Central Council for Physical Recreation, we were joined by Pete Moorey from NCVO who worked with us on our joint campaign over the diversion of Lottery funds to the 2012 Olympics. We talked about the latest select committee reports on the funding of the Olympics and agreed to write a joint letter to the Secretary of State, Andy Burnham, to remind the Government of the commitments that it made to us at the beginning of the year. We also discussed the Cultural Olympiad, the draft Heritage Protection Bill, the development of a European voluntary sector ‘compact’ and much more.

I was in London on Wednesday to attend my first full NCVO Executive meeting since being elected to the Executive in February. Among many other topics, we had a very interesting discussion about NCVO’s plans to develop the ‘civil society agenda’ – looking at how voluntary organisations, community groups, universities, trade unions, housing associations etc. can work together to develop a strong and healthy civil society. This echoes the mission statement the Voluntary Arts Network adopted many years ago and I will, of course, be working hard to ensure that arts organisations are an integral part of the developing agenda. Two key issues came out of our discussion: firstly the need to see ‘civil society’ as a space in which to work together rather than a ‘sector’; and secondly the need to identify specific causes and issues that will motivate all parts of civil society to work together.