Cultural Playing Field

On Wednesday I was back at the Barbican for ‘Our Creative Talent: building local voluntary and amateur arts participation’ - a joint conference organised by Voluntary Arts England, Arts Council England and the Department for Culture, Media and Sport. The event was fully booked weeks ago and attracted delegates from voluntary arts umbrella bodies, several government departments, local authorities from across England,  voluntary sector agencies and lots of officers from Arts Council England as well as representatives from Scottish Arts Council and the Arts Council of Wales.

The main focus for the conference was to launch the report ‘Our Creative Talent: the voluntary and amateur arts in England’ - the results of research commissioned by DCMS and ACE and undertaken by the consultants TBR. Culture Minister Margaret Hodge opened the conference by revealing the headline statistics from the report:

• there are 49,140 voluntary arts groups in England
• between them they have a total membership of 5.9 million and an additional 3.5 million people volunteer as extras or helpers - that’s a total of 9.4 million people taking part
• the voluntary arts sector has an income of £543 million a year
• voluntary arts groups attract an annual audience of 159 million attendances
• 564,000 people have management roles in voluntary arts groups

It was very exciting for me to be sharing a platform with Margaret Hodge, Arts Council England Chief Executive Alan Davey and Feargal Sharkey. The Minister started by saying “I hope and believe that this conference marks a significant change in the way we think about the arts and what we call ‘the arts sector’”. She called the research “a significant new landmark in our  understanding of how and why people participate in the arts” and said “we have been paying too little attention to such an important part of the arts ecology”. Margaret Hodge said “I firmly believe that the health of our arts depends on both the professional and the voluntary sector - the two are closely and directly dependent on one another”.

In my speech I stressed the importance of moving beyond marvelling at the statistics and starting to work out how to unlock the enormous potential of the voluntary arts. I explained that what voluntary arts groups want and need is recognition, involvement, capacity-building and challenge. I finished by suggesting that this conference was possibly the most important moment for the voluntary arts in the 60 years since the establishment of the Arts Council - but added that it would mean nothing unless it was the start of an ongoing dialogue to realise the potential of the voluntary arts.

Alan Davey said “from an Arts Council perspective the voluntary arts isn’t a  footnote or appendix to the arts in England today: it is part of the core script”. He announced that in the coming months Arts Council England “will be working with Voluntary Arts Network to agree a plan of how we play a role in building on the strengths and successes of the sector by working with local government and other key partners”.

Feargal Sharkey speaking at the Our Creative Talent conference

The conference also included detailed sessions on the ‘Our Creative Talent’ research, Arts Council England’s segmentation model of arts engagement, the development of a Participation Manifesto, the VAE/Media Trust ‘Up for Arts’ campaign, local authorities and the NI11 arts engagement indicator and the 2012  Cultural Olympiad. There was a real buzz throughout the day and the feedback has been incredibly positive. It really felt like a significant turning point and it will be vital that we quickly build on the enthusiasm generated.

Copies of presentations, video, audio and much more will soon be available at www.vaengland.org.uk/events and you can see photos from the conference at www.flickr.com/photos/ourcreativetalent. The research report is available at www.voluntaryarts.org/uploaded/map7402.pdf
Congratulations and many many thanks to everyone involved in a wonderful day for the voluntary arts.

On Wednesday afternoon I attended a meeting of the DCMS Voluntary and Community Sector Forum. With the departure of Alan Davey (to Arts Council England), the Forum has a new chair – Graham Turnock, Director or Programmes and DCMS Third Sector Champion. We heard a presentation on funding for youth culture and the interface between DCMS and the Department for Children, Schools and Families – focusing on the ‘Aiming High’, ‘Myplace’ and ‘Find Your Talent’ programmes. We also heard from Sarah Wilkie of the MLA about the ‘Community Libraries Programme’ and from Steve Mannix of LOCOG about the 2012 Cultural Olympiad. Finally we discussed how to involve VCS organisations in the project board overseeing DCMS involvement in the new Government target PSA21 (communities).

On Wednesday I was at the Cabinet Office in London to meet John Knights, Policy Manager- Volunteering at the Office of the Third Sector (OTS) to discuss opportunities for volunteering in relation to the 2012 Cultural Olympiad. We talked about how to ensure voluntary arts groups take advantage of the opportunities presented by the Cultural Olympiad, how the Olympic volunteering programme is being co-ordinated between LOCOG, OTS, DCMS etc, and how to realise the aim of the Games to leave a legacy of increased participation in the arts. We also discussed how OTS might be able to help us to work across other Government Departments to improve support for the voluntary arts and help to unlock the potential of the sector.

Yesterday morning I was at Canary Wharf in London at the offices of the London Organising Committee of the Olympic Games (LOCOG) to meet the UK Cultural Programme Advisor, Francesca Canty. Francesca told me that, since the ‘Inspire Mark’ for non-commercial projects inspired by the 2012 Games was launched on 11 March they have had 30 applications. She is very keen to ensure that the first few projects granted the Inspire Mark include some from voluntary arts groups in order to reinforce the message that the Cultural Olympiad is open to all groups – regardless of scale. We talked further about how the Voluntary Arts Network could work with the regional and national Creative Programmers to ensure that voluntary arts groups maximise the opportunities presented by the Cultural Olympiad to achieve recognition at a national and international level. We discussed the possibility of a series of LOCOG roadshows around the country specifically for voluntary arts groups. Francesca emphasised that to achieve the Inspire Mark, projects will have to embrace the Cultural Olympiad criteria and values and be new and innovative – “like never before”. I assured her that voluntary arts groups were more than capable of rising to this creative challenge.

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.

This morning I presented a session on the 2012 Cultural Olympiad at the Volunteering England Convention in Gateshead at which I launched the second VAN ‘Once in a Lifetime’ Briefing – available shortly at: http://www.voluntaryarts.org/2012 – which explains how to develop and submit project ideas for the UK-wide cultural festival. It was good to hear Sarah Benioff (Deputy Director of the Office of the Third Sector at the Cabinet Office) later in the morning referring to the importance of the Cultural Olympiad in helping to develop a sustainable legacy of increased volunteering. Sarah took a fair bit of flak from delegates – particularly about the lack of sustainable funding for local volunteer centres. Someone made the point that, welcome though the Government’s new Access to Volunteering fund to encourage more disabled volunteers is, this £4M investment compares poorly with the £117M recently allocated to youth volunteering. But I think the Office of the Third Sector gains credibility and respect by regularly being willing to put up senior civil servants to listen to the sector at conferences and seminars.

On Wednesday afternoon I met Leonie Sakey at Arts Council England for a catch-up on the Cultural Olympiad. Following the 11 March launch of the application process for groups wishing to have their projects included in the Olympiad, there has been a slow start with plenty of enquiries but few actual submissions. LOCOG is looking again at its communications and thinking about engaging an agency to help get its messages out. Meanwhile I told Leonie that Ginny has been working on the second VAN ‘Once in a Lifetime’ Briefing which will spell out exactly how voluntary arts groups can get involved in the Cultural Olympiad. This should be available by the end of April. Leonie commented on how helpful our first Briefing had been in simplifying and clarifying the mysteries of the Olympiad and said she had used it herself on many occasions. She emphasised that very few organisations were being endorsed by LOCOG to issue information about the Olympiad and, although LOCOG was not able formally to make VAN an official Olympic partner, we were as close as anyone to such a position. I raised again the idea of a small grants fund to encourage voluntary arts groups to develop projects for the Olympiad and Leonie agreed there was a need for this but could not see where the funding might come from.

I was in London on Wednesday for a meeting of the acevo Arts, Culture & Heritage Special Interest Group. Among many other things we had some very interesting discussions about the ‘public benefit’ changes resulting from the 2006 Charities Act which could result in some ‘fee charging charities’ losing their charitable status. Although this will mainly affect independent schools there may be implications for arts and heritage charities that charge substantial fees for their services. We also heard the latest rumours about the ‘Hodge Review’ of the regional cultural agencies in England and discussed the Heritage Bill, the forthcoming DCMS seminar on excellence in relation to the voluntary sector (which came about as a result of the acevo group’s meeting with Margaret Hodge at the end of January) and the 2012 Cultural Olympiad.

This morning I was at Live Theatre in Newcastle for one of the regional briefing sessions on the 2012 Cultural Olympiad. As Bill Morris announced on the London 2012 blog this morning, the Cultural Olympiad is now “open for business”. Details of how to apply to have your project recognised as part of the Olympiad are now at: www.london2012.com/beinspired. Months of delicate legal negotiations with the IOC have resulted in an agreement to endorse a ‘non-commercial mark’ for the 2012 Olympics. This is the first time this has ever been achieved and makes the concept of a four-year UK-wide cultural festival viable. The ‘Inspire Mark’ (which bizarrely we were only shown the tiniest glimpse of in this morning’s official presentation) will be used (sparingly, at least at first) to endorse non-commerical projects and events inspired by the Olympics. This means that it will only be available to projects without any commercial sponsorship which may prove to be a problem for some. We were told that the application process for Cultural Olympiad projects will have a 7-week turnaround time and everyone will first have to have discussed their ideas with the relevant local Creative Programmer. In this morning’s question and answer session I asked Lorna Fulton, the North East Creative Programmer, how she planned to cope with potentially thousands of enquiries from voluntary arts groups in the North East. I was delighted that her answer was that she understood discussions were going on nationally about this with the Voluntary Arts Network. We still have work to do on this but it’s great that the Creative Programmers seem to have accepted the importance of VAN playing a role. But, as Bill Morris says in his blog: “The truth is that all of this will come to naught without great content” and I am still frustrated by the clear need for a small grants fund to inspire local community groups across the UK to dream up projects that fit the criteria for the 2012 Cultural Olympiad. Time to redouble our efforts on this.

We clearly need a small grants fund to inspire local community groups across the UK to dream up projects that fit the criteria for the 2012 Cultural Olympiad. The idea of a four-year UK-wide festival needs small local groups if it is to work. At present there is little motivation for the Cultural Olympiad amongst these groups because of the disillusion created by the transfer of Lottery funds to pay for the Olympic venues. I have been using the phrase “ambition deficit” to describe this which a few people have picked up.

LOCOG is adamant that the Olympiad won’t just ‘badge’ things that were already going to happen - they want all Olympiad projects to be truly reflective of the Olympic ideals and the values and themes of the Olympiad. I think voluntary arts groups are the ideal people to rise to this challenge and would undoubtedly dream up some fantastic creative solutions to reflect these values within their local community - if they were not completely switched off by the whole thing!

We know from plenty of experience with small grants funds that the presence of the fund acts as a catalyst to get people devising projects - many of which will then happen whether or not they get a grant from the fund. But without a fund few groups are going to even start thinking about devising projects. Also it is important that the small grants fund is UK-wide if we are to counter the commonly-held impression that the Olympics (and the Olympiad) is just for London and the South East.