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 Monday I was in London to chair a meeting of the Association of Chief Executives of Voluntary Organisations (acevo) Arts, Culture & Heritage Special Interest Group. Gail Robinson from the Department for Culture, Media and Sport joined us to discuss the department’s Third Sector Strategy. The new version of the strategy is going to focus on six themes: recognition, voice, the compact, accessing support, social enterprise and local authorities. We agreed that voluntary and community sector organisations in the arts, culture and heritage are often not perceived as part of the third sector but also tend not to see themselves as part of the third sector, thereby missing out on substantial available support. We also discussed mechanisms for DCMS to engage with the acevo Special Interest Group on a regular basis and talked again about the Charity Commission consultation on fee charging. Finally I reported back to the group about the DCMS/Arts Council England seminar on Excellence and the Voluntary Arts on 4 June, which had arisen as a result of the Special Interest Group’s meeting with Culture Minister Margaret Hodge in January.

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).

This morning I was at The Goring Hotel, Victoria, London, for the final breakfast meeting of the Volunteering Hub Scrutiny Committee. We reflected on the achievements of the Volunteering Hub and the 104 projects we have funded over the past 3 years. We discussed our successes and failures and tried to identify the areas in which the Hub has had the most significant effect. We also heard how the new Volunteering National Support Service is progressing. This will be a much smaller, more focussed partnership programme which will take forward some aspects of the Hub’s work. To ensure continuity, members of the Volunteering Hub Scrutiny Committee have been invited to join a new advisory committee for the National Support Service but I have decided that, after two years, this feels like the right time to bow out and concentrate on other things. I have very much enjoyed the experience of being part of the Scrutiny Committee. I think the model of bringing in external expertise to scrutinise the work of the Volunteering Hub has proved useful and effective. We have certainly been rigorous in our examination of commissioning proposals and project reports - and I think this has been a healthy process for all involved. I’ve gained much insight and confidence myself from being a scrutineer. But I won’t miss getting up at 5 am for the meetings - despite the wonderful breakfasts!

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.

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/

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.