BVSC Chief Executive, Brian Carr, opening the event
On Thursday I was at BVSC, The Centre for Voluntary Action, in Birmingham for an event organised by the Third Sector Research Centre and BVSC to mark the tenth anniversary of TSRC. ‘Continuity and change in an era of instability: developing a shared agenda for voluntary action research and practice’ brought together academics and voluntary sector leaders to look at the state of the third sector and the role research can play.
Dan Corry
Dan Corry, Chief Executive of New Philanthropy Capital, gave the keynote presentation, emphasising that a strong civil society is crucial to a successful society and a successful economy, not least in relation to generating social capital. He described civil society as what people in local communities choose to do and looked at where civil society is weak and what we can do about it. Looking at the research data he noted that more prosperous areas have a higher density of charities (though this only counts registered charities) and volunteering rates are higher in more prosperous areas. He talked about a growing spilt between professional charities and volunteer-led ones. Dan Corry finished by saying we need more academics looking at the voluntary sector – and this requires a dedicated funding stream. He said charities want easy access to longitudinal data and noted there is often an anti-academic bias in charities. A lot of what academics study is of no use to the average charity or funder, and they can’t get access to it. The What Works Centres play an important role in pulling together research and making it more accessible.
We then had a series of short ‘lightning talks’ by researchers Rob McMillan, John Mohan and Angela Ellis Paine from TSRC and James Rees, the Director of the Centre for Voluntary Sector Leadership at the Open University. They looked at trends in the voluntary sector over recent years and the current challenges facing civil society.
In the afternoon I took part in a workshop looking at whether communities can make place-based change happen, led by Mandy Wilson and our old friend Angus McCabe from TSRC. We discussed hyper-local community action and I spoke about the work Voluntary Arts has been doing on Making Common Cause.
Robin Simpson.
On Thursday I was at the Martin Harris Centre at the University of Manchester to take part in ‘Cultural Democracy: Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow’ – a symposium organised by Alison Jeffers and Gerri Moriarty to mark the launch of their new book ‘Culture, Democracy and the Right to Make Art: the British Community Arts Movement’. Opening the symposium Alison Jeffers suggested that the term ‘cultural democracy’ “seems to be having a bit of a moment”. It is a term that seems to have come back into fashion.
In the first panel session we looked at what we can learn from the histories of cultural democracy. Cathy Mackerras, Sophie Hope, Stephen Hadley and Owen Kelly reflected on UK culture policy’s close encounters with cultural democracy from the 1930s to the 1980s. There was much discussion of moving beyond deficit models of participation and the democratisation of culture toward a more direct engagement with cultural democracy. Owen Kelly talked about the development of the 1986 Community Arts Culture and Democracy Manifesto, noting that “we thought cultural democracy meant equal access to the means of cultural production” but that “the means of production turns out to mean the means of distribution”.
The second panel session asked ‘What is the current state of cultural democracy and what are the possibilities for the future?’. Andrew Miles discussed some of the early findings of the Understanding Everyday Participation research project and asked “why are some activities valued a culture whilst others are not?” He suggested “there is no such thing as a cultural non user” and that “there is nothing special about the arts”, saying most participation is about the social aspect rather than the particular cultural activity. Andrew also noted that the Brexit vote demonstrates the clear ways that social and cultural divisions have re emerged. Nick Wilson and Jonathan Gross spoke about the Get Creative Research Project and their report ‘Towards Cultural Democracy’, explaining their evolving Human development and capabilities approach in which they use ‘cultural opportunities’ to mean “the freedom to give form and value to our experiences”. Finally Steve Vickers, Project Manager for The Agency – a leadership programme developed by Contact in Moston and Harpurhey in Manchester, gave some practical examples of working with cultural democracy.
It was a fascinating day which provided much food for thought and it was encouraging to see so many people engaging with the issue of participation and cultural democracy.
Robin Simpson.
On Thursday I was in Bristol for the National Co-ordinating Centre for Public Engagement’s ‘Engage’ Conference. The theme of the conference was ‘Exploring Collaboration’ and delegates included representatives of community organisations, universities, charities, policy makers and funders from all around the world. Professor Eleonora Belfiore from Loughborough University and I led a workshop on ‘Collaboration and policy-sensitive research’, drawing on our experience of the AHRC Understanding Everyday Participation research project. We discussed the challenges of trying to effect policy change through collaborative research. I highlighted three risks: that the community partners just want the research to justify what they already think they know; that the academic research partners end up merely presenting back to the community partners the information they provided; and that, even if the research goes well, the final glossy report and its recommendations lie forgotten in a drawer a few months later without having achieved any policy change. We had a lively and thoughtful debate with our workshop participants which surfaced many examples of both good and bad practice in relation to policy-sensitive research.
Robin Simpson.
Filed under: meetings | Tags: ace, arts, England, health, politics, research, volarts, wellbeing
On Thursday I was at King’s College, London, for the launch of ‘Creative Health: The Arts for Health and Wellbeing’ – the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Arts, Health and Wellbeing Inquiry Report. The report was published in July but a formal launch event wasn’t possible then, so soon after the snap General Election. So on Thursday, King’s College London who worked with the APPG on its two-year Inquiry hosted this event in which Deborah Bull compèred a panel discussion on the report and its recommendations.
Lord Howarth, Co-Chair of the APPG, spoke about the potential of the arts in health and social care. He explained that the inquiry had organised 16 roundtables involving more than 300 people, importantly including service users, and had produced 10 specific recommendations.
Rebecca Gordon-Nesbitt, from King’s College, said it was clear that engagement with the arts, particularly through participation, helps people get well and stay well. She said the inquiry had extended its definition of arts to include everyday activity – the stuff that happens behind closed doors in people’s homes and in communities.
The report says:
“Millions of people in the UK engage with the arts as part of their everyday lives. As we demonstrate in this report, arts engagement has a beneficial effect upon health and wellbeing and therefore has a vital part to play in the public health arena.” …
“When we talk about the arts, we include the visual and performing arts, crafts, dance, film, literature, music and singing. To this list, we add gardening … and the equally absorbing culinary arts.” …
“In this report, then, ‘the arts’ is used as shorthand for everyday human creativity, rather than referring to a lofty activity which requires some sort of superior cultural intelligence to access.”
Lord Howarth pointed out that the report’s 10 recommendations are not all directed at government. What is actually needed is a culture change in the health establishment. Recommendation 1 calls for a new national strategic centre to be established “to support the advance of good practice, promote collaboration, coordinate and disseminate research and inform policy and delivery” – but this should not be created by government.
Former Culture Minister, Ed Vaizey MP, Co-Chair of the APPG, said he had wanted to use the Government’s 2016 Culture White Paper to show the wide range of impacts the arts have but had faced a stunning lack of interest from Ministers in other Government departments. It was hard to get Ministers to engage beyond their silos.
Arts Council England Chief Executive, Darren Henley, said he was interested in seeing arts and health as more central to ACE’s new 10-year strategy but, for ACE, it has to be all about the arts: the Arts Council is about promoting excellence.
Interestingly, the APPG report says:
“On the one hand, it would be a disservice to participants to offer substandard arts activities under the banner of health and wellbeing, and the examples given in this report show high-quality work being undertaken in an avowedly inclusive way. On the other hand, in participatory arts activities with people who have not previously been encouraged to express their creativity, it is the quality of the activity, rather than the quality of output, that matters.”
Shirley Cramer, Chief Executive of the Royal Society for Public Health, said arts and health shouldn’t be a nice-to-have add-on: it should be mainstream.
You can download the APPG report from: http://www.artshealthandwellbeing.org.uk/appg-inquiry/
At the end of 2014, at the weekly meetings I took part in to develop the Get Creative campaign with the BBC, Deborah Bull from King College, London, was adamant that we must build in a robust evaluation of the campaign from the start. Jointly funded by the BBC and the Cultural Institute at King’s College London, the Get Creative Research Project ran alongside the Get Creative campaign from its launch in February 2015. The research was led by Dr Nick Wilson from King’s College and had two overarching aims. Firstly, to provide a rigorous evaluation of the Get Creative campaign; and secondly, to investigate key questions raised by the campaign regarding the ‘landscape’ of arts practice and participation.
In May 2016 the Get Creative Research Project’s interim report, ‘Get Creative: Opening Our Eyes to Everyday Creativity’ celebrated the successes of the first year of the Get Creative campaign but also surfaced a number of underlying problems and issues and made a series of recommendations. This led directly to a clarification of the aims and objectives of Get Creative and the establishment of a Get Creative Steering Group with formal Terms of Reference.
This week the Get Creative Research Project published its final report, ‘Towards Cultural Democracy: promoting cultural capabilities for everyone’, written by Nick Wilson, Jonathan Gross and Anna Bull. ‘Towards Cultural Democracy’ uses the learning from the Get Creative campaign to call for a radical but pragmatic new approach to understanding and enabling cultural opportunity. It argues that cultural opportunities are comprised of a far broader range of freedoms than access to already existing publicly funded arts – the primary focus of current cultural policy. Everyone has cultural capability – by ensuring there are more cultural opportunities for people to realise their own creative potential it would be possible to move towards cultural democracy: “an achievable future in which the substantive freedom to co-create versions of culture is enjoyed by all”.
‘Towards Cultural Democracy’ makes 14 recommendations, starting with the suggestion that “Promoting cultural capabilities for everyone (cultural democracy) needs to be made an interlinked policy objective, across a range of national government departments and agencies” and including a recommendation to “Develop mutually beneficial relationships with local radio as a key channel for the promotion of everyday creativity” which specifically references Voluntary Arts’ Up for Arts projects.
On Wednesday afternoon I was at Somerset House in London for a workshop to explore the recommendations from ‘Towards cultural democracy: Promoting cultural capabilities for everyone’. Discussing the background to the research, Jonathan Gross talked about the conclusions of the Warwick Commission on the Future of Cultural Value, which recommended celebrating everyday arts, and the critiques of the traditional ‘Deficit Model’ which had emerged from the Get Creative Research Project. He spoke about the rising interest in everyday creativity in recent years, indicated by the rise of Fun Palaces, 64 Million Artists, and Get Creative itself. Jonathan also referred to the increase in academic research in this area, citing studies including the Understanding Everyday Participation Research Project being led by the University of Manchester and Helen Nicholson’s research into amateur theatre.
Nick Wilson stressed that everyday creativity is not new but suggested that the ‘Towards Cultural Democracy’ shows how we are now understanding the interconnections with the subsidised arts much better. He described the idea of thinking about cultural opportunities and cultural capabilities, rather than just mapping existing cultural assets and restricting debates to access to publicly funded arts. Nick called for reframing of decision-making across cultural policy to recognise the role played by creative citizens and pillar organisations.
Our workshop also included seven short presentations about how we enable cultural opportunities, featuring speakers including Jo Hunter from 64 Million Artists, Kunle Olulode from Voice for Change and me.
On Wednesday evening Damien and I attended the formal launch of ‘Towards Cultural Democracy: promoting cultural capabilities for everyone’ at King’s College, London. Inspirational speeches from Deborah Bull, Nick Wilson, Stella Duffy and Lizzie Crump emphasised the importance of the report and the momentum that appears to be gathering towards a significant shift in policy to recognise the importance of everyday creativity. The evening concluded with a cultural opportunity to allow us all to demonstrate our cultural capabilities as Alex and Flo – featured in the report as one of the portraits of people co-creating their own distinctive versions of culture – taught us all some the basics of ‘breaking’ (better known to the uninitiated as break-dancing). The sight of many of the most influential cultural leaders, activists and policy-makers spinning around on the floor of King’s College will live long in my memory!
You can download the report ‘‘Towards Cultural Democracy: promoting cultural capabilities for everyone’ from: http://www.kcl.ac.uk/Cultural/-/Projects/Towards-cultural-democracy.aspx
Robin Simpson.
Filed under: meetings | Tags: ace, arts, diversity, funding, research, UK
On Monday I was in London to take part in a meeting of the AHRC Connected Communities Advisory Group. The Arts & Humanities Research Council has now confirmed that the Connected Communities programme, which funds innovative collaborative research undertaken by partnerships involving academic institutions and community organisations, will continue until 2020. In Monday’s meeting we discussed the ‘Utopias’ programme of activities supported by Connected Communities to link to ‘Utopia 500’ – which commemorates five hundred years since the publication of Thomas More’s Utopia (see: http://www.utopia500.net/). The Utopia Fair at Somerset House in June showcased the creative outcomes from 25 AHRC-funded projects. These projects brought together local community groups, researchers, activists and artists across the UK to explore how utopian ideals can be used to benefit the environmental and social future of our communities. Representatives from contemporary Utopian movements from all over the UK took up stands in Somerset House’ courtyard, celebrating the pockets of utopia that are flourishing around the country from Newcastle to Merthyr Tydfil, Sheffield to Scotland, Brighton to Doncaster plus a range of London sites. There is a video summary of the Utopia Fair at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h2k8U_fYJGw. I was interested to learn about links developed by the Utopias programme to ‘Like Culture’ – a cultural network of European cities and regions: http://www.likeculture.eu/. In Monday’s meeting we also heard about ‘Common Cause’ – the new Connected Communities BAME project which aims to strengthen and extend the existing network of university and BAME community collaborators working in the arts and humanities. Common Cause is an 18 month project, supported by Arts Council England and the Runnymead Trust, and I was delighted to learn that Voluntary Arts BAME Advisory Panel Chair, David Bryan, is now part of the team delivering the project for Connected Communities.
Robin Simpson.
Filed under: meetings | Tags: ace, arts, England, excellence, funding, research, volarts
On Tuesday and Wednesday I was at Cast in Doncaster for ‘People Place Power’ – the third Creative People and Places conference. Creative People and Places is the Arts Council England programme to increase engagement in the arts and culture in some of the areas of England that currently fall within the 10% least engaged (as measured by the Active People Survey). ACE has funded 21 consortia including local arts organisations, voluntary and public sector agencies and other partners to develop innovative approaches to increasing engagement. Voluntary Arts is a member of the Peterborough CPP consortium (‘Peterborough Presents’) and is working in partnership with several other CPPs. We have also been contracted by the national network of CPPs to provide and advice and support to help all CPPs work with local voluntary and amateur arts groups.
Opening the conference, CPP National Steering Group Chair, Holly Donagh, reflected on changes in the engagement debate over recent years. She said “we’ve got initiatives like 64 Million Artists and Everyday Creativity, the BBC’s Get Creative campaign, Fun Palaces, the work of Voluntary Arts, Paul Hamlyn’s Artworks programme, just to name a few national initiatives. And in some ways those questions of reach, audience engagement and democracy have become the most interesting questions about the arts and really central to the debate now, where perhaps once they were more marginal.” Holly also suggested that “business as usual is not sufficient for the challenges of the future and ignoring fault lines and inequalities that existed for generations will serve all communities poorly in the long run”.
Giving the opening keynote presentation, ACE Chief Executive Darren Henley talked about the need for a creativity revolution: “a change in how we think about and use our natural everyday creativity and how we need to recognise the importance of making and participating art and culture in all aspects of our lives”. He said: “This means listening to people and working with them to help develop their ideas about what a local culture might mean. While the concept of strong national culture should offer confidence, opportunity and inclusivity to all, a local culture provides the primary sense of belonging and participation the sharing and self belief that all successful communities need and which is crucial in all our lives young and old. And it’s what makes us special as a community and that’s very precious.” Darren Henley spoke about the importance of the democratisation of culture and building sustainable local infrastructure.
The second keynote speaker, on Wednesday morning, was the Guardian journalist Lynsey Hanley who gave a brilliantly entertaining and provocative presentation, drawing on her new book about class and culture, ‘Respectable’. She talked about doing culture the ‘right way’ vs doing it the way you want to, saying “feeling extremely uncomfortable to the point of thinking ‘I just can’t do this’ is not unusual for a socially mobile person”. She asked whether the Internet really widens access to knowledge when acronyms rule and discussed the ‘canalisation of television’, asking “why is there a BBC4?” And she completely won her audience over when, in response to a question from the floor, she suggested we should “find out what people are doing already and invest in that”.
Also on Wednesday morning I chaired a conference breakout session titled ‘What is quality and how do we measure it?’ Kathryn Goodfellow and Juliet Hardy from bait (the South East Northumberland CPP) spoke about the development of the bait quality evaluation framework. Abigail Gilmore from the University of Manchester discussed the Culture Counts quality measurement tools and learning from the AHRC Understanding Everyday Participation research project. And Mark Robinson from Thinking Practice reported on the CPP national evaluation. After these presentations we had a very interesting and engaged conversation about measuring quality and excellence which grappled with how to capture the ‘magic’ element of cultural activities.
Over the past couple of months, the Voluntary Arts Up for Arts team (Helen Randle, Helen Jones and Jennie Dennett) have been interviewing voluntary and amateur arts groups across the country about their experiences of working with CPPs, in order to produce a series of five-minute audio case studies. On Wednesday afternoon Helen Randle and I presented a conference breakout session in which we played some of the recorded interviews to provoke a discussion about the challenges of working with voluntary arts groups. It was great to have some CPP representatives in the room who personally knew some of the interviewees and the recordings proved to be a very effective way to generate a rich conversation – as well as ensuring that some genuine participant voices were heard at the conference. Many thanks to Helen, Helen and Jennie for their work on the case studies.
The final conference session on Wednesday afternoon was a panel discussion chaired by the Guardian Theatre Critic, Lyn Gardner, looking at the relationship between excellence of art and excellence of engagement. The speakers included Jo Hunter from 64 Million Artists. My final memory of a really interesting and provocative conference was Lyn Gardner’s comment: “What is Great Art anyway? Maybe it’s just an Arts Council construct.”
On Monday I was at Kings Place in London for a meeting of the steering group for the ‘A Choir in Every Care Home’ project. We are now in month five of this twelve month project, funded by the Baring Foundation and being led by Live Music Now and Sound Sense. Since our last steering group meeting Care England has joined the extensive list of project partners.
At Monday’s meeting we heard from Stephen Clift of the Sydney de Haan Research Centre about recent research which has been looking at the emotional, psychological and physical benefits of singing. Studies have shown that singing can be of benefit to people with lung problems and there is some interesting evidence about the impact of singing on people with Parkinsons. Oxford University research, led by Robin Dunbar, has been looking at the evolutionary purpose of singing and a study with the Workers Educational Association in Oxford has compared singing with other forms of creative activity, showing that social bonding happened much more quickly in groups doing singing than other forms of creative activity. The Sidney de Haan Research Centre has been creating a comprehensive listing for the ‘A Choir in Every Care Home’ project of all the research that has been done on singing and wellbeing.
Since our last meeting ‘A Choir in Every Care Home’ has conducted four surveys, instigated a systematic review of the evidence base and undertaken lots of field visits. Kathryn Deane from Sound Sense presented the results of the surveys which have looked at the purposes of singing in care homes, what care homes need singing to achieve and what types of singing already exist in care homes. She outlined the benefits of singing in care homes – to the residents and to the care home staff. She also discussed the barriers to introducing or increasing singing in care homes.
Evan Dawson from Live Music Now explained that the project had been keen to look at whether it could emulate in the 20,000 care homes what the Sing Up project had achieved in 20,000 primary schools. Michelle James from Sing Up described the experience of developing singing in primary schools. She emphasised the need to view the project as a campaign – and the value that had been gained by bringing in professional campaigning expertise. She also outlined some of the solutions that Sing Up had developed to overcome key barriers to singing in primary schools.
Des Kelly from the National Care Forum gave us a fascinating presentation about the context in which care homes are operating. In 1989 most care homes were in the public sector. Now, in England, around 70% of all care homes are private for-profit organisations, approximately 20% are voluntary not-for-profit organisations and only a very small proportion remain in the public sector. There are 18,000 care homes in England, three quarters of which are residential care homes: the rest are nursing homes. The Care Quality Commission has rated a third of all care homes, of which 60% were ‘good’ or ‘outstanding’. The average age of admission into care has gone up by ten years in the last ten years: the average age of admission is now 85. 80% of care home residents have dementia. The duration of stay in care is decreasing: the average stay in a nursing home is now one year. Staff turnover on average in the care sector is running at 20% and only 12% of workforce is under the age of 25. The top 6 corporate care providers account for 60% of the market.
This is clearly a challenging environment in which to try to achieve ‘A Choir in Every Care Home’ but the project is progressing carefully and sensibly and there is a growing alliance of organisations working together on the project.
Robin Simpson.
Cultural Playing Field 