Collaborative working pilots

New ways of working that can free up capacity, enable cost savings and improve delivery and experience of great art

Context

MMM’s 2007 report ‘Towards a Healthy Ecology of Arts and Culture’ stated that there is significant unrealised potential for arts and cultural organisations to leverage their own talents and those of other organisations by working together and that the challenges and opportunities of developing mergers, back office consolidations and joint ventures needed to be further investigated.

This programme strand is piloting new collaborative, networked approaches to back office functions and externally facing service innovation and design amongst six groups of arts and cultural organsiations in Scotland and the North East of England. Learning from the pilots will help develop a greater understanding by funders on how to approach, allocate and distribute grants and technical assistance for collaboration and a larger pool of specialist expertise which arts and cultural organisations can draw from to aid collaborative working.

Morag Arnot, Acting Deputy Chief Executive of The Scottish Arts Council said:

“Through the development and implementation of our quality framework attention has been paid to strengthening the financial and organisational capacity of arts organisations. The overextension and undercapitalisation of the sector needs to be addressed, both by ourselves and by arts organisations themselves especially in the current economic climate. Supporting collaboration, consolidation and other long term co-operative activities between organisations is one contribution to this critical issue that the Scottish Arts Council is making through its partnership with MMM. We look forward to learning from the pilots about how we can support most effectively changes in working practice through the experiences of this extraordinary cohort of leading Scottish and English arts organisations.”

Mark Robinson, Executive Director of Arts Council England North East said:

“Learning how to collaborate more effectively is going to be as important for the funding community as it is for arts organisations. Arts Council England wants to be a great funder that makes a difference and encourages resilience not reliance. While this gets more and more critical, at times it can feel as if the environment makes that difficult. But we are up for the challenge and hope we can learn lots from these pilots about the role of funders in collaboration, and how our behaviours and habits might need to change.”

Paul Rubenstein, Assistant Chief Executive, Newcastle City Council and Jane Robinson, Assistant Chief Executive, Gateshead City Council said:

“Newcastle and Gateshead have been transformed by investment in cultural infrastructure. But this transformation took place when times where good and money from arts and non arts sources was more readily available than it is today and perhaps for the foreseeable future. This means we have ambitious, dynamic cultural organisations, often housed in fantastic buildings but without the necessary capital to maximise their potential. Our project will, uniquely, explore whether there is a solution to this dilemma working across Newcastle Gateshead. If successful, we hope to lead the way to new, long term models of sustainable expansion in the cultural sector.”

Penny Vowles, Culture and Heritage Programme, Northern Rock Foundation said:

“The Northern Rock Foundation has long history of investing in capacity building in the non profit sector. We were keen to fund the MMM programme because of its rare focus on organisational and financial resilience in the arts sector and its mission to develop practical and conceptual tools which will help organisations pursue new financial and operating approaches. We hope the ideas being promoted by MMM will become more mainstream and as a result more arts organisations across the UK will be able to respond better to their increasingly complex operating environment.”

Activities

Six pilots have been identified from groups of organisations that were already considering experimenting with and developing collaborative working around financial, organisational and service innovation and design or traditional back office shared services ideas in Scotland and the North East of England.

Participating groups in Scotland are:

The five National Performing Arts Companies – Scottish Ballet, Scottish Opera, The National Theatre of Scotland, The Royal Scottish National Orchestra and Scottish Chamber Opera are focusing on the development of shared technology platforms and other new technology related opportunities to enable a major step change in public engagement opportunities.

The Literature Forum for Scotland which includes The Association for Scottish Literary Studies, Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals in Scotland (CILIPS), The Convention of Scottish Local Authorities (COSLA), Edinburgh International Book Festival, Edinburgh UNESCO City of Literature, The Gaelic Books Council, Itchy Coo, Moniack Mhor, National Association for Literature Development (NALD), National Library of Scotland, Playwrights’ Studio Scotland, Publishing Scotland, Scots Language Centre, Scottish Book Trust, Scottish Language Dictionaries, Scottish Society of Playwrights, Scottish PEN, Scottish Poetry Library, Scottish Storytelling Forum, Society of Authors in Scotland and the University of Glasgow are focusing on the task of delivering a new strategic vision for Literature in Scotland, exploring a more radical framework for the development, delivery and sustainability of the vision and its planned outcomes.

Festivals Edinburgh on behalf of the twelve Edinburgh Festivals: Bank of Scotland Imaginate Festival, Edinburgh Art Festival, Edinburgh Festival Fringe, Edinburgh International Book Festival, Edinburgh International Festival, Edinburgh International Film Festival, Edinburgh Jazz and Blues Festival, Edinburgh International Science Festival, Edinburgh Mela, Edinburgh’s Hogmanay, Edinburgh Military Tattoo and the Scottish International Storytelling Festival is working strategically in six core areas in order to develop the global competitive edge of Edinburgh’s Festivals.

Participating groups in the North East of England are:

The Gateshead Newcastle Arts Forum – The Sage Gateshead, BALTIC, Centre for Life, Great North Museum, Tyneside Cinema, Waygood Gallery and Studios, Dance City, Theatre Royal, Live Theatre, Seven Stories and Northern Stage are developing a long term capitalisation strategy for the group.

BalletLorent, The Empty Space, Name and Northern Stage are rationalising and re- imagining access to and use of rehearsal and development space for emerging work in the performing arts in the region.

AV Festival, Northern Lights Film Festival and Tyneside Cinema are devising ways of sharing a range of back office functions and developing a more collaborative approach to programming and public engagement.

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Read early comments from the six groups here