Filed under: meetings | Tags: funding, heritage, ncvo, politics, UK, vcs, volarts
I was back in London on Tuesday for a regular meeting of my voluntary cultural sector alliance – with CCPR and Heritage Link. We were joined by Louisa Darian from NCVO and, as usual, covered a wide and varied range of topics. We are all concerned about the potential detrimental effect on small, local, cultural groups of the ending of the Awards for All lottery grant scheme. We discussed the possible effects of the recession on our sectors – both in relation to the local groups we support and their national membership organisations. Heritage Link is naturally pre-occupied with the dropping of the Heritage Protection Bill from the Queen’s Speech: having spent eight years working on this, there is now little prospect of the proposed legislation being implemented. We also talked about NCVO’s Funding Commission, which is to be launched in January, and the importance of ensuring it considers funding for cultural voluntary and community sector organisations.
Robin Simpson.
I was back in London on Thursday to attend a meeting of the Community Sector Coalition. We were joined by Angus McCabe from the new Third Sector Research Centre. The Third Sector Research Centre is being jointly hosted by the University of Southampton and the University of Birmingham. It is funded for five years by the Economic and Social Research Council, the Office of the Third Sector and the Barrow Cadbury Trust. The centre will be running a number of research programmes to build an evidence base for the third sector, looking at the theoretical and policy context, mapping and measuring the sector, assessing impact and looking specifically at social enterprises. Angus’s focus is on ‘below the radar’ organisations – including small community organisations. I asked him how his work would help voluntary arts groups and he acknowledged that, while the arts, culture and leisure forms approximately 30% of the third sector, it has always been fairly marginal to the rest of the sector. He was keen to address this in his research and invited me to discuss this further with him. Among many other topics, we discussed how changes to the ‘Awards for All’ Lottery grant scheme might adversely affect small community groups, the introduction of the new Grassroots Grants scheme and applications to the Department for Communities and Local Government Empowerment Fund.
Robin Simpson.
On Wednesday I was at NCVO in London for the second of a series of meetings about how NCVO could work more effectively with voluntary and community sector infrastructure organisations. It now looks as if there are more than 1000 infrastructure organisations within NCVO’s membership – including national, regional, generic, specialist and functionalist infrastructure. As we continue to develop ideas about how NCVO could better connect with such organisations within its membership, we were keen to emphasise that any approach must be based on mutuality and reciprocity – not just looking paternalistically at how NCVO can benefit from developing better relationships, but rather at how the relevant organisations can work in partnership towards shared goals.
Robin Simpson.
On Monday I was at the Imperial War Museum in London to attend a round-table meeting organised by the Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills. The Department’s Informal Adult Learning consultation earlier this year elicited 5500 formal responses and is likely to result in a Green or White Paper in January 2009. This was one of a series of events to look in detail at the proposals to be launched in January. The theme of Monday’s round-table was ‘supporting self-organising learning’ – ie groups of people who come together to organise their own informal learning, including voluntary arts groups. The rationale is that self-organised learning helps develop civil society and supports social cohesion and DIUS is looking at how to join up support from a range of Government departments for such activity – whilst stressing that this is not about trying to reduce or shift existing funding. We looked in detail at how to ‘signpost’ people to this wide range of learning opportunities, better support for groups – particularly in relation to the spaces they need in which to operate and other major barriers to the development of self-organising groups including insurance, licensing issues etc. There is clearly great potential for more coherent Government support to voluntary arts groups across the relevant Government departments and I look forward to seeing the final proposals from DIUS in January.
Robin Simpson.
Today I have been at the Hilton Hotel in Cardiff to meet Nick Capaldi, the new Chief Executive of the Arts Council of Wales. Nick knows the Voluntary Arts Network well from his time as Executive Director of Arts Council England, South West. I first met him at The British Federation of Festivals conference in Bristol in 1997 when, as Music Officer of South West Arts, he shared a platform with the VAN Chief Executive, Roger Fox. Nick has always been sympathetic to the needs of the voluntary arts and it was very encouraging to find him prepared to set aside time, early in his new job at ACW, to talk to us about Voluntary Arts Wales and how we can work together to promote participation in the arts and crafts. We covered a wide range of topics including the need to map the voluntary arts sector in Wales, how we might work more strategically with umbrella bodies and the role of the arts within the wider voluntary sector.
Robin Simpson.
Filed under: meetings | Tags: England, funding, OTS, training, vcs, volarts
On Monday I was in London to attend a meeting of the Community Sector Coalition Steering Group for the Leadership & Governance National Support Service. Our discussions focused on one particular strand of the new support service which aims to address the need to improve leadership skills in small community groups. All the National Support Services funded by Capacitybuilders are designed to build capacity in front-line, grassroots, voluntary and community sector groups by working with ‘support providers’ including infrastructure organisations and umbrella bodies. In this case a pilot programme of training is planned for development workers in support providers working with local community groups to enable them to champion leadership skills. On Monday we met the consultants who have been contracted to deliver this pilot programme and helped them to start to design the training. I am very keen to ensure that at least one voluntary arts umbrella body is involved in the first training sessions, which are likely to take place in Spring 2009.
Robin Simpson.
Last Friday I was in Stratford-upon-Avon to meet Deborah Shaw at the Royal Shakespeare Company. Deborah is responsible for the 2012 World Shakespeare Festival which will take place from April – July 2012. Activities will happen around the UK but the main focus will be on London, Stratford and Newcastle. The RSC is hoping to work with schools and non-professional theatre and to use this opportunity to develop interaction between professional and amateur drama. There will be an emphasis on learning from each other and using Shakespeare to explore a wide range of themes in creative ways – not just a series of conventional staged productions. We are still at a very early stage: the details of the festival do not have to be finalised until September 2009. Deborah is keen to involve the Voluntary Arts Network and the amateur drama umbrella bodies in developing the way the festival will involve non-professional theatre. The RSC has agreed to host a major voluntary arts consultative meeting in Stratford in March 2009. This will provide an opportunity for the amateur theatre umbrella bodies and representative organisations to work with the RSC to help to design the World Shakespeare Festival. I think this in itself is a significant step forward – the voluntary arts being offered the chance to develop a way of working with the RSC that we hope will lay the ground for further similar collaboration beyond 2012.
Robin Simpson.
Cultural Playing Field 