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 morning I was in London for the penultimate meeting of the Volunteering Hub Scrutiny Committee. As well as agreeing the process for the final evaluation of the Volunteering Hub, we heard a presentation on some of the research commissioned by the Hub from the Institute for Volunteering Research. This included two studies of particular relevance to the voluntary arts sector: ‘The impact of public policy on Volunteering in Community-based organisations’ which concluded that small, community-based organisations are increasingly being ‘molded’ by the external forces of legislation, regulation and funding; and ‘Volunteering to lead: a study of leadership within small volunteer-led groups’ which included some interesting observations about succession issues in small organisations. Both these studies also referred to the tendency of small, community-based organisations to link to specific specialist infrastructure organisations (such as artform umbrella bodies) rather than generic voluntary sector support organisations or the volunteering infrastructure. This seems to reinforce my view that, to support the mass of very small community organisations effectively, specialist infrastructure organisations need to be better resourced and the generic support organisations need to work more closely with these specialist bodies. You can read the research summaries at http://www.ivr.org.uk/researchbulletins/

Today I have been in London at DCMS for a meeting of the voluntary arts research steering group. The researchers, TBR, presented the initial results of the online quantitative survey of voluntary arts groups in England and the qualitative interviews they have conducted. We’re not allowed to make any of the findings public yet – the final report will be launched at the VAE/ACE/DCMS conference which is now going to take place on 2 July – but I was reassured that the initial results seem to reinforce some of our key messages.