Russell Willis Taylor is CEO of National Arts Strategies, the pioneer body in the US for organisational leadership for arts and culture.
Listen to Russell’s critique of our Governments’ drive to increase US style fundraising in the arts, her views on how part of the answer to the global financial collapse is to do less better and her belief that the times we live in require artists and arts leaders to be revolutionaries.
MMM is currently working on a research project called Sustainable Ability whichis mapping the response to climate change and resource scarcity in the cultural sector.
As part of this important work we are carrying out a survey to find out more of the barriers to change and what interventions really work.
We’d be delighted if you took part in the survey so that you can contribute to what is proving to be a fascinating and challenging piece of work, the results of which we shall publish in the summer.
CLICK HERE to take the survey and fear not…it only takes 10 minutes!
Earlier this Spring, MMM held its latest event entitled Thriving on Less which asked the question of whether the arts could lead the way in a world where we not only have less money, but less carbon, less growth and just less stuff.
The videos from the Manchester and London legs of the event are now online at the dedicated page here. As a taster, below is some of the conversations and thoughts generated from the London session.
MMM is working on a major national research project called Capital Matters aimed at designing a new policy framework for building financial resilience in the UK arts & cultural sector
We have prepared a short briefing for arts and cultural organisations with a series of questions at the end. If you have not already attended one of MMM’s consultations on the research, please take a look and let us have your views and we shall include them in the full research report.
Last night saw the official launch of the Centre for Creative Collaboration, a new and experimental space in Central London which uses the principles of open innovation to encourage collaboration between creative disciplines.
It has however been open for a few months already to find its feet, so I recently took the chance to talk with Brian Condon of Complexity Partners – the convenors who helped make the overall project happen – to find out about what it is, how people can get involved and what they’re learning already.
And if you want to follow the conversation about the centre on Twitter you can do so by watching the hashtag #c4cc
Resource scarcity, (particularly fuel, food and water), climate change and the industrial growth economy that is causing them are becoming the major challenges of our times, ones which all sectors, industries and communities need to respond to urgently and effectively.
In the last two years or so in the UK arts and cultural sector, there has been an increasing flurry of new activities around climate change. Thus far these have been primarily artist-led initiatives responding through creative practice. More concerted efforts are beginning to emerge where arts and cultural organisations are being encouraged to review the impact of their carbon footprints at an operational level. However, feedback from the sector to MMM is showing that whilst initiatives by funding and independent agencies are emerging in this latter space, the burgeoning set of benchmarking and audit offers is beginning to cause confusion about where to go to access information and support and there is a major risk that lack of ‘joined-up’ thinking and doing will reduce engagement and impact.
Mapping who is doing what, what tools are available, what other resources are available and where best practice is emerging is becoming a commonly asked question by funders, practitioners and organisations alike.
In the light of these concerns, MMM in partnership with ERA21 and through the support of The Paul Hamlyn Foundation are conducting a piece of research calles Sustainable Ability to catalogue initiatives and responses across the ERA21 group, the Arts Councils across the UK and the museums and galleries agencies client base in the following two areas:
As well as identifying what is currently considered best practice in terms of existing providers of services and arts and cultural organisations who have or are tackling these agendas, the work will summarise the motivations and barriers to behaviour change.
There will be the opportunity to take part in this research through a survey and the results of the work will be published in the summer.
Just before Easter I had the great pleasure of attending Rewired State Culture, the first culture-focussed instance of Rewired State who have the brilliant tagline of Geeks Meet Government.
The day-long session was held at the Guardian’s London HQ and had an excellent format. On one track you had the geeks working with various data sets provided for the day using their creativity to prototype new services and apps. And on the other track you had people passionate about the cultural sector and technology (like me) in an unconference format talking about the issues of the area.
At the end of the day there was a showcase of what the developers had created and while I’d love to show them all, I include only a small selection.
You can read a fuller review of the day here (thank you Brian Kelly) and see the project list at the Rewired State site. It worked really well and I hope that they hold another culture focussed event soon, especially since one of the co-convenors of RS is the infectiously passionate DCMS CIO Mark O’Neill. I feel there is definitely scope to open the discussion wider in the cultural sector with much of the focus this time on collections and museums.
I recently had a fascinating conversation with Juliana Farha, founder and MD of Dilettante – the exciting classical music social web service. We covered all sorts of topics and this is the first of a two part interview where Juliana introduces Dilettante and shares her thoughts on the excitement and challenges of being a pioneer in the space where classical music and the social web meet.
Unprecedented rates of change are fast becoming the hallmark of the twenty-first century. In the face of these challenges we simply cannot afford to limit our ambition to being sustainable – instead we must measure our success against the capacity to be resilient. Resilience is the ability to thrive in this context of constant change. This is not just being able to bounce back from adversity into “business as usual” but instead to use it as the proximate cause for innovation and transformation.
Mission Models Money has seen many organisations getting stuck in sustainability. By not framing themselves within resilience, they avoid asking the big questions as to whether the resources going into their efforts represent wise investments.
Do we need it today just because we wanted it yesterday…or indeed the day before yesterday? Or is today disruptively different
Enjoying a diversity of income streams can indeed be a central characteristic of a resilient organisation. But this will only be the case if – among the diversity – each income stream shares the common factor of aligning unashamedly with mission…and a mission which is flexible, inclusive and literate to our times.
So yes, let us diversify but first let us revisit our business models as a whole and reassess the assumptions at its core. And while this will mean asking the hard questions, our financial diversity will be more wrapping paper than gift. Our prize is none other than resilience, organisations which are genuinely responsive, not just reactive.
The Almanac is an incredibly well put-together and designed document so we fully recommend you get yourselves a copy of it. It was also accompagnied by a fine poster visualising money flows in the sector.
Rohan gave this presentation to the Kent Cultural Summit on Monday April 19th. It is given in Prezi and you can see the original version here (Kent Cultural Summit final v1 on Prezi)
Rohan mentions several things in his presentation, here are links to most of them:
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