Kersi Rustomji is 75 years old and was born in Uganda. He is one of the thousands of Ugandan Asians who fled the country when the Ugandan dictator Idi Amin gave the Asian community 90 days to leave. Kersi, who is from Parsi, or Parsee, Indian background went to Australia and settled there.

His writing is fascinating and those who understand Parsi culture, Kersi sees the world around him through Parsi ‘eyes’ and often mixes two or three languages to write about issues that matter to him

The advent of digital media has been beneficial to many writers and lobbyists. It consists of developing new weblogs or blogs, websites and video materials and accessing popular networking sites. My own work in digital inclusion consists of three parts:

• Helping creative people to reach audiences
• Helping mainstream audiences to reach unique work but not necessarily new work.
• Helping individuals and organisations to develop capacity and capability to access and outreach programmes
• Helping individuals and organisations to develop networking initiatives through new joint ventures, networking programmes, partnerships and funding initiatives.

A campaign to support Kersi Rustomji to reach audiences-  

a) To reach hard to reach people, community groups and organisations which may be considered “hard to reach”- a major commitment to ensure that lack of technical knowledge does not exclude them from the world of communication and audience development and

b) To develop new audiences, for example, structured support to create and retain new audiences.

c) To forge, develop and join new collaborations

The second objective of my campaign consists of the reverse – creating access to new and innovative   artists and writers through ‘mainstreaming’ a programme of action which consists of proactive action to identify interesting work and to support the development of networks. The third part of the campaign is to help prospective collaborators to develop capacity, joint ventures and new funding options to create new work or to upgrade existing work where needed.

 Kersi Rustomji’s earlier work can be accessed by visiting this site: http://kersirustomji.blogspot.com/

COMPETITION!

Using Ephemeral Arts for School Projects:

How can artistic outcomes be used to create case studies for secondary school students working on their GCSE coursework assessments? 

Here is an easy competition for teachers and artists. Write a Memo not exceeding 500 words and send it to me by email. The task that you have to work on is outlined below:

You have to examine two pictures of Ephemeral Arts and study the background in which it is created and the purpose of the artistic output. One, known as the Arti Thali is shown below.  Reference is provided to Tibetan Mandalas.  State how you would use these pictures and ephemeral arts in general to help GCSE students to use and understand time-based culture as a project for their coursework.

 CLOSING DATE:  25th November 2009  

 The best submission gets a book token of £20.00 and a free entry to the forthcoming Mirador Online Training Programme called Celebrating Ephemeral Arts: A Learning and Skills Programme with practical benefits. The normal price of the module is expected to be £225.00. 

Your Memo will be published here and four other runner up submissions will also be added as separate pages.

Any further queries relating to the competition are available, on request. Please send me an email: kalwant.ajimal@btinternet.com

Mirador’s online training programme is the first of its type and is aimed at providing comprehensive training and guidance for senior students of art and secondary school teachers to become affiliated with Mirador as Ephemeral Arts Innovators or to work as practitioners in their own right. Further information is available on request.

Where is the picture? You have to find it!

To find a picture of a Tibetan Mandala, you can insert these words into google or use the guidance  provided here:

Announcing a New Joint Cultural and Community Action Programme at Centre@270 Trust

Avenues for joint venture action on key issues relating to local development have been explored in this blog from 2006 onwards. We have taken care that all proposals should reflect the needs and aspirations of local communities and stakeholder groups and community organisations.  The London Borough of Newham has provided the first opportunity, based on the commitment of the Ramgarhia Sikh Community but working through a new trust, which is under incorporation. Known as Centre@270 Trust, the new site will be a culmination of several years of aspirational work. However, the site, which presents major opportunities for launching new programmes, will itself need major repairs and refurbishment before it can become fully usable to tackle the ambitious programme outlined below.

Centre @270 Trust

In association with Ramgharia Gurdwara, Newham and Kalwant Ajimal Associates Ltd and The Centre @270 Trust (under incorporation). Ramgharia Gurdwara is the owner of all programmes to be carried out under the auspices of the Centre @270 Trust, as the programme sponsor and patron until the Centre is able to run its operations following incorporation.  

Background

The Trustees of the Ramgarhia Gurdwara, or the Sikh Temple, met with Grant Aitken, Head of Culture at Newham Council a few months ago. Reference was made to the work that Kalwant Ajimal carried out for Newham Council in 2006/07 when Peter Appleton was Head of Culture at the council. As an integral part of a review, Kalwant Ajimal has highlighted a number of new diversity projects and also put forward proposals for ‘mainstreaming’[1] new work at the Centre at 270 Neville Road.

 Action

During the next 4-5 months, Kalwant Ajimal will be launching and embedding the Culture@270 programme at 270 Neville Road. The Trustees of Ramgarhia Gurdwara at Neville Road have approved the work programme and investment in collaboration with local organisations and individuals has been agreed. The Centre is expected to assume full control of the work programme in borough in the long term as its own working committees and programme teams are able to develop action for local delivery.

Asian Arts Access has run a large number of successful arts events and productions, always in conjunction with leading artists and partners, with Kalwant Ajimal acting as ‘executive producer’. Please see www.asianartsaccess.org for some of the background. However, for work at Centre@270 Programme to be successful, a great deal of new work will need to be generated to reflect local needs and the policy priorities of the Newham Council.

The feasibility study for Newham Council, referred to above, outlined the following work to be developed in Newham for presentation to local and regional audiences:

• Drumbeat- An International Festival of Percussion to be connected with Newham Bhangra Explosion
• The East London River Festival
• A Festival of Ephemeral Arts (www.ephemeralarts.com)
• Masks with Meaning- new work under development by Asian Arts Access is to form the basis for an application to run the project at the Centre.

In addition, Asian Arts Access has been in consultation with Screen South, the southern region screen agency of the Film Council, UK. It is felt that most of this work is also transferrable to East London, with policies to reflect the needs of London film funding priorities.

Developing a Portfolio of Work for Culture@270 programme, and other projects.

The Centre@270 Trust expects to operate a series of initiatives. As indicated above, the name of the organisation responsible for effective management and utilisation of the premises and facilities shall be The Centre@270 Trust Limited (with the title ‘Limited’ dropped from the name by permission of registrars at Companies House).

The individual programmes of the centre may have generic names such as those listed below to create a uniform identity in order to achieve benefits of branding the services and the outputs of the Centre. Examples are:

-       Culture@270 programme, a uniform logo shown below

-       Communities@270 programme

-       Youth @270 programme

-       Learning and Skills@270 Programme, and so on.

-       Care for the elderly, to be summarised as Care@270 programme

-       Action for engagement of women, to be presented as Women@270 Programme, with women to be involved in the development and leadership of the programme.

A detailed guide to the work programme is presented on the right under PAGES

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 accepted:

a) Planning for expansion is different than planning for growth

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

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 

1. 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 
2. Cultural planners are unable to attract skilled workforce or invest in their training 
3. Lack of planning frustrates the development of capacity to deliver cultural output 
4. Cultural programmers may be driven to procure new artistic work from other       countries at the expense of alienating local producers 
5. Lack of investment in partnerships fails to leverage resources into the economy 
6. Lack of planning fails to identify co-dependencies, namely the delivery of secondary services such as catering,  
7. 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 says:

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 apart from 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