Art & Money: Here’s the change (Marmalade 2016)

Last week we were at Marmalade, a fringe social enterprise festival at Oxford running alongside Skoll World Forum, where all manner of people interested in social change meet to exchange ideas and come up with new ones. The ‘hackathon’ (crowdsource ideas from the audience, collectively aggregate and refine, then each individual opts in to develop their favourite as a team in a series of intense, structured sessions)  as a means to come up with an actionable, practical solution to a given problem is the pop methodology here – and an incredibly effective one at that.

Friday’s Art & Money: Here’s the Change day was no exception and was a testament to not only the approach, but also to the energy and talents of the diverse range of people working in the arts sector. The session was in effect a follow-up to a similar day in 2015 where the problem was identified and the gauntlet laid down: how can arts organisations become more inclusive, impactful and sustainable with less money to go around? The 2016 session crowdsourced a range of solutions angled at a number of different aspects to the problem – from more compelling storytelling, to better impact evidence, to encouraging greater collaboration and knowledge-sharing across the arts sector. Alas, that sounds like a collection of buzzwords – we’ll outline the actual ideas from the floor and let them do the talking! –

• Collaborative working – Establishment of partnerships between arts organisations in a particular locale – ‘local arts partnerships’ – in order to pool resources, contacts, knowledge and strategically broker mutually beneficial relationships with local businesses. This could realise private sector resources, such as skills, commercial space and possibly funding in exchange for brand development, employee engagement and giving back to the local community. It was recognised that this is already happening but that learnings from groups should be shared to help the idea permeate through regions and art forms to enable synergies to thrive and best practice to spread and scale.
• Asset Audit – Identifying commercial uses for existing assets by creating networks of organisations that can scrutinise each other’s business models and offer fresh perspectives on what might work. Related to this would be sharing lessons of successful examples of cross-subsidy models in the sector – where a social sector organisation has used some existing asset (or maybe invested in a completely new asset) to earn commercial revenues to support its social mission. A local pilot was envisaged and drafted involving twelve organisations of varying sizes ‘hacking’ each other’s assets and coming up with strategic business plans with the help of a skilled facilitator
• Realisation and promotion of the value of the arts – Better communication of the value (economic and beyond) of the arts to government and the wider public. There were a few ideas here: creating an agency for the purpose of lobbying government to increase funding to the arts; developing an audio-guide app that would tell people about the artistic and cultural heritage of a particular area; and an ‘Artists’ Dragons’ Den’ TV show concept that pitches innovative projects to investors. The range of these ideas demonstrates an acute awareness of the need to articulate artistic and social impact, as well as opportunities to drive economic benefits and financial resilience, and creative ways of doing all of these.
• Resource Portal – Aggregation of existing resources available towards fostering greater resilience and sustainability of organisations in a visible one-stop-shop web portal. There are few resources on business planning, financial modelling, legal practicalities and social impact measurement that aren’t already somewhere on the internet – and nobody wants to reinvent the wheel. So collating everything into one place and championing it could be an easy way to make sure that everyone’s in the loop.

It was the cross-subsidy / asset audit idea that won the floor in a close-run vote at Marmalade. A small cash prize was fundraised amongst the attendees that will be available for 12 months. Oxford City Council pledged to match the funding towards development of the idea in the local setting, and we look forward to seeing where it goes and contributing where possible. One of the outcomes we hope to achieve by running a sector-specific fund is a close and deep understanding of the best business models for the sector, which recognise and respect the need to maintain a careful balance between integrity of artistic output and commercial resilience.

Like many of the ideas on the day, the roadmap ahead for this potential project and positive steps to action were clearly established and defined, and inventively expressed – being art-based, each team was encouraged to present their ideas to the others as a performance. The creative capacity displayed was quite remarkable: from a dystopian sketch of a world without art to illustrate the importance of a supportive policy framework; to a Lego animation showing the power of collective enterprise; to a puppet show demonstrating the need for a clear resource marketplace; to a Dylanesque vision of a collaborative weekend arts development bootcamp – it couldn’t have been a more powerful representation of what we at the Arts Impact Fund are continually observing – the fecund pools of creativity and invention simmering throughout the arts and culture worlds and readying themselves to address the problem of driving resilience in an austerity climate.