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.

• Feedback from their consultation, Achieving Great Art for Everyone, strongly indicates the appetite in the sector for more concentration on this area, and, in an environment where public sector funding will become ever tighter, ACE want to ensure the sector is ready and equipped to find as many new funding sources as it can.
• The Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport has also placed this theme at the very top of his agenda, and it is possible that future public sector funding will be linked to contributions from other sources.

In doing this work ACE are talking to the sector about what needs it has, and what support and incentives the ACE could provide in the future. They are particularly interested to look at how we can spread expertise and capacity to attract private giving beyond those who are currently successful, and to understand the needs of organisations outside London or in other metropolitan centres.

ACE also say that they are interested in exploring new and innovative forms of philanthropy and private giving which may help the arts increase the amount of funding it attracts.

I found this news heartening on a number of levels. First of all that the Achieving Great Arts for Everyone consultation process had thrown up the sector’s interest and concern in this part of the spectrum of income generation, secondly the recognition of how hard it is to achieve fundraised income outside of the big metropolises and thirdly that ACE say they are interested in new ideas which might increase the amount of funding the sector attracts.

This last point hints at what I hope might be a more systemic view of funding and financing that ACE and other NDPB’s have hitherto understood.  As defined by the Prime Minister’s Strategy Unit, ‘Systems thinking is both a mindset and particular set of tools for identifying and mapping the inter-related nature and complexity of real world situations. It encourages explicit recognition of causes and effects, drivers and impacts, and in so doing helps anticipate the effect a policy intervention is likely to have on variables or issues of interest. Furthermore, the process of applying systems thinking to a situation is a way of bringing to light the different assumptions held by stakeholders or team members about the way the world works.’

We need to evolve a more systemic view of how we fund and finance creative practice. My worry at the moment is that there is a lot of focus on philanthropy (and elite philanthropy at that), which is only one part of the income spectrum that arts and cultural organisations could get better at tapping into. (See MMM’s income spectrum for more detail). We need the same level of attention to and incentivising of new ideas and new behaviours (including from donors, funders and investors) across the whole of the income spectrum from philanthropic, grant funding, alternative financial instruments such as revenue sharing arrangements (quasi-equity), underwriting or loans which MMM has been looking into for the last five years and which is current the subject of our Capital Matters research, the structured market and the open market.  They are all connected, the energies around each part of that spectrum feed off and feed into each other and mindsets and skillsets need help evolving across the board.

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!

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.

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.

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

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:

• Artist-led responses to climate change and resource scarcity
• Initiatives focused on organisations reducing their overall ecological impact

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.

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.

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.