Making a few Distinctions

In a recent report to a client I have argued that they need to invest in developing future capability. I have drawn the following distinctions which they have accpeted:

a) Planning for expansion is different than planning for growth

b) Planning for developing capacity to deliver is different from capability to deliver

c) There are strong interfaces between the local economy and culture.

When local economies fail to flourish

This scenario presents major losses to the local cultural economies if cultural planning was to fail and local provision is not enhanced to meet the demands of new or expanding markets.  A worst-case scenario prevails where 

·         arts and cultural producers, community groups, local authorities, arts funders and business sponsors fail to analyse and scrutinise their options for growth by promoting culture as a driver for the local economy 

·         cultural planners are unable to attract skilled workforce or invest in their training 

·         lack of planning frustrates the development of capacity to deliver cultural output ·         cultural programmers may be driven to procure new artistic work from other countries at the expense of alienating local producers 

·         lack of investment in partnerships fails to leverage resources into the economy 

·         lack of planning fails to identify co-dependencies, namely the delivery of secondary services such as catering,  

·         lack of development of culture as a cross-cutting agenda precludes new investment for capital infrastructure.(Source unknown)

 What do you think?

As I have argued before, the need to plan for London Olympics 2012 is paramount. Local authorities cannot afford to adopt “hit-and-miss” approach. Local authorities also should not aim to implement half hearted approaches.

What should local authorities be doing?  If your local economy is failing, how can you help to rescue and revive it?

We are updating our work on Ephemeral Arts. These are arts which are temporary or short-lived and based on a specifc occasion or event and transitory in nature.

A new blog offers challenging opportunities for teachers, librarians and students. Please click this banner to access the blog http://ephemeral-arts.blogspot.com

The main festival website has been used by senior students for researching their GCSE Art coursework and projects. Please see www.ephemeralarts.com

 Culture, housing and Kinship in East London- new opportunities for investment

The IdeA website http://www.ideaknowledge.gov.uk/  refers to the publication  of 'The new East End’, which examines how life in London’s inner East End has changed since the 1950s. Published by Profile Books, it draws on the 1957 book by Young and Willmott, ‘Family and kinship in East London’.  The authors of ‘Family and kinship’ argued that housing policy and the welfare state could undermine family structures and support networks. ‘The new East End’ examines relations between the white working class and British-Bangladeshi populations of Tower Hamlets.  The book looks at the causes of hostility to newcomers to the area; it concludes that the welfare state and well intentioned housing policies have inadvertently contributed to racial tensions.

Kate Gavron, one of the authors of the book says: 

" There is a sense of community, or communities. There is definitely a sense of community among the white working class families still living in Tower Hamlets, and a very strong sense of community among the Bangladeshis.  There are a lot of people who want to buy houses in Tower Hamlets; it’s a nice place to live and near the centre of London…..more and more Bangladeshi families will move further out of London. They almost certainly won’t be able to live near each other so there will be a scattering effect.

Among the older white people who expressed hostility, their only solution was for them to have priority over the housing. But for most of them it was already too late because their sons and daughters were perfectly happy living out in Essex. Nobody really had any answers, apart from the provision of more social housing. Which should have happened from the beginning of the right-to-buy process, in my view. After all, this was a place where there was already an acute housing shortage and gentrification, the right-to-buy and the development of Docklands, all happening within one decade.  

It will be interesting to see if there are any further large migrations of one group. The Bangladeshis, Jews, Irish and the Huguenots went to the East End because of the docks and because it was the poorest part of inner London. Now the docks are closed there’s no reason for any one group to end up there.

It’s no longer a cheap area of London, so there may be no more large new communities arriving en bloc. There are, however, likely to be lots of people arriving from all over, including migration from other parts of London and Britain.  

I think that local authorities and the Government – and other organisations like the Young Foundation in Bethnal Green – are thinking hard about building communities, including looking at housing design.

For example they are thinking about how to combine the housing of families with young children and old people, and about how to encourage a feeling of neighbourhood, rather like the old neighbourhoods.

Whether you can construct this remains to be seen; to try to create a ‘village centre’ feel is a considerable challenge, especially when people nowadays are so mobile. There is a long way to go to rebuild the community spirit of the past."

Mirador:

There are challenges for agencies involved in the development of culture in the East End. The first entails working closely with all sections of the community to create and helping to retain the sense of community. The second challenge involves the development of policies and strategies for investing in culture as an integral aprt of the planning process.

How is this going to be done? I intend to talk to one or two people who are leaders in developing the thinking in this area and have produced initial results.

Various writers, researchers and consultants have put forward challenging arguments to outline the role of culture in the economies of cities, regions and countries where culture is seen as a major economic driver. For us here at Mirador, the issue is not whether culture has a positive role in economic development. We take that for granted although the case needs to be made!

I will be sharing various insights into this subject, which is attracting interest from a wide range of groups, to continually reaffirm our view that strategic investment in culture produces major benefits for the economy.

There are also some concerns. The first is about definition, ‘measurement’and validation of cultural concepts, their impact or outputs, contribution to wealth creation and the relationships between inputs and outputs, all aspects loosely described as the ‘evidence-base’ for culture. There are different views on what should be included and what should be excluded in the quantification or aggregation of cultural output. However, as long as the definitions are clearly stated and appropriate qualifications are provided, there is ample scope for developing the debate.

One of the most urgent concerns is how investment in culture can be secured to provide the greatest possible returns to the economy in terms of employment, value added, the creation of multiplier effects and the benefits that culture can deliver for the development of markets, the creation of economies of scale and through the forging of positive linkages in economies where culture is recognised as a major contributor to the gross domestic product (GDP).

There is a further challenge for agencies involved in the development and promotion of culture as a driver for economic development. Using the example of input-output analysis, there is perhaps scope for developing a model to project various levels of economic growth and to ascertain how different levels of investment in culture can be optimised to produce a given rate of return. Is the art or science of economic modelling able to provide such an analysis? If this was at all possible, perhaps people who campaign for investment in culture would be able to quantify the real benefits to the economy and society.

Many years ago the National Health Service used to say that they were investing £Xmillion in improving their service. Today, they report that an investment of £xmillion has yielded a specific number of hospital beds, operating theatres and a known increase of trained staff. In other words, the focus of reports has shifted from inputs to outputs. In the UK, where the developmental activities connected with increasing the capacity of cultural providers is mostly grant funded and the entertainment and leisure industries receive a combination of public and private sector investment, it should be possible to project the outputs that a given investment in culture should realise.

Critics of this argument may even justifiably say that you can only assess outcomes and outputs if you can measure them. A study of the economic impact of the Brighton Festival provides interesting conclusions. I hope to return to this later.

The first of many supplements, The Times Supplement, dated 17 May 2006, offers a fairly comprehensive coverage of some of the key issues.  Its coverage of historical information is particularly interesting.

The main shortcoming of the Supplement, in my view, is the lack of coverage of Culture and its importance for 2012 and the period of up to ten years after the Olympics, described in the cultural sector as the 'legacy'. It would have been helpful to see a coverage of what the five London Boroughs which are hosting the Olympics, and indeed the rest of London will be doing to develop their cultural provision for 2012, how international visitors and the local audiences will be entertained and most importantly, how local communities will take part in developing cultural programmes.

Readers who missed the supplement can still read it at www.timesonline.co.uk/towards2012

The Arts Professional, issue 122 of 22nd may 2006 reports that the 'theatre sector has been criticised on race' and says that an independent report has called for a network of dedicated buildings to be established for Black theatre to reverse decades of under-funding.

Mirador will soon present its own views on this key report.

Mirador Culture has launched Creative Diversity Recruitment - CDR, a new support service for arts and cultural organisations. Only one of the areas of  its focus is on recruitment. We believe that no organisation can positively confirm its commitment to cultural diversity unless its HR policies relate to its business plans, its customer care policies and its staff recruitment and retention strategies. So cultrual diversity is concerned with reaching audiences as much as with human resource management to help gain long-term competitive advantage.

Our focus on Creative Diversity places the onus of new product development for diverse markets on diverse teams. Diversity has to generate a creative response to help reach new and diverse audiences and to consolidate your marketing plans. It is best not to treat it as an imposition.

Creative Diversity has its own web log at http://creativediversityrecruitment.wordpress.com It provides professional insights through various analyses of creative diversity by using a number of free checklists. It also directs your recruitment advertising at self-registered people who have an interest in diversity. A database of professional people who are active in this market is being updated all the time.

We start taking recruitment advertising from 1st June.

Do you need an external challenge and a critical friend? CDR offers services of senior professionals who have worked at the coalface of delivery systems. CDR has also finalised the development of a confidential review methodology, known as the Creative Diversity Challenge Framework. Its logic is derived from years of experience of monitoring and evaluation of organisations, high level expertise derived from applying similar methodologies used by the Audit Commission and adaptation of assessments used by funding bodies.

Please call Kalwant Ajimal on 01483 538265 or email to make enquiries in confidence kalwant.ajimal@btinternet.com

The terms 'cultural diversity', 'diversity', 'inclusivenes' and 'creative diversity' all represent various aspects of a common and ongoing debate.  The key issues of interest to investors in culture can be summarised by linking cultural diversity to sustainable development.

Beliefs, traditions and values are connected to various forms of artistic expression which help to create sources of meaning for communities and groups, even countries. The essence of this connected approach is that it addresses the fundamental challenge of distinctiveness.

Within a short period of time, if this is not already happening, an increasing number of arts organisations in London are going to be looking at the new markets leading to 2012 as an "opportunity". However, these efforts must be preceded by critical and objective reviews of their operations before they try to jump on the Olympics bandwagon!

Mirador has prepared an initial checklist for evaluating these options. This list is best seen as a means of looking at the 'big picture' before detailed actions are considered. The following questions are not to be seen as a challenge to curb the new euphoria.

The Perceived Opportunities:

1. Why do individual and corporate players in the cultural sector see the Olympics as an opportunity? What has really changed?
2. What do they have to do now better before they can tap these new opportunities? How well are they performing now?
3. What is the scope for winning more audiences by introducing marketing improvements that the 'new business' of the Olympics will offer them? 
4. Why could they not achieve these improvements before? Are there any untapped marketing opportunities then that still exist now?

The Real Opportunities:

1. How are the new programmes going to be funded and delivered? What will be the impact of these decisions be on the development of arts and cultural organisations?
2. How many organisations will actually realise that these decisions are best made by challenging their own 'business planning assumptions' before they can act?
3. There are also key questions for arts funders and programming bodies. Have they made any projections for growth of audiences? How did Athens and Sydney deal with these questions? Can we learn from their experience?
4. Arts organisations will have to make critical choices - to what extent can they plan and fund realistic expansion based on existing resources?
5. Are the arts organisation planning to fund growth, which is not the same as expansion!

The Attainable Opportunties:

Sooner or later the arts funding mechansim may have to address the real challenge - by determining what is attainable and what is not.

1. Will the best option be to develop a 'audience/market model' which projects growth on a realistic basis and then decides to fund only the most realistic programmes for provision?
2. Will the arts funders opt to 'prescribe' their preferred growth by stating the only options that they will fund by using competitive criteria?
3. Will the arts funders receive additional Lottery money at the expense of other causes to fund growth in cultural provision?

Considering the possible impact of the Government's comprehensive spending review, the answer may well lie here-  what is attainable by using realistic planning scenarios both at the 'macro' level and the organisational or 'micro' level

The economic importance of the creative industries 

What does the term 'creative industries' mean? How significant is the creative sector? What opportunities does the sector present?

In the past, consensus on defintions has not been easy to achieve. As a result the estimates of the size and importance of the creative sector vary.

This is straight from NESTA's website.  Please see the Page tab above marked 'Publications and Research'.