Working

Tuesday, January 27th, 2009 | Working with funders from the commercial sector | No Comments

Funding from business takes time and patience to achieve, but once trust and enthusiasm is won with the partner business your organisation is likely to be able to run projects you feel are appropriate for your clients without the targets, numbers and paperwork associated with Government funded initiatives. If you are comfortable with the business match, and what the business require in exchange is acceptable to you and your organisation (we are not talking here of initiatives which force inappropriate products or advertising on children in inappropriate locations – for example soft drink vending machines in schools in exchange for extra curricular project funding), the support of a business can be invaluable. I have previously project managed the FreqOUT! initiative at Vital Regeneration and with time, and some valuable champions inside various businesses we developed working relationships which exchanged direct funding as well as equipment (cameras, handheld pc’s, GPS units), access to personal with specialist technical knowledge, publicity departments and support for our steering group.

Achieving sponsorship from business can appear to be an insurmountable task. It takes a stable organisation and a committed team to put time aside time to research and contact appropriate businesses; develop supportive material to explain your track record, your goals and your strategies in clear language and present and update them as your experience grows. Our experience at FreqOUT! is that if you can find businesses in a quasi partnering situation (similar location, interest, target group or other) and you present well with an idea that provides an ‘everybody wins solution’ you may be lucky enough to find yourself a ‘champion’. It takes just one person within a business who understands what you are trying to do and supports you to turn the indomitable tasks into an achievable and exciting challenge. They can open doors for you, help you fine tune your presentations and paper work, advise on strategy and generally get excited about what you are all trying to achieve.

Never devalue what you have to bring to businesses. For your supporters with the business  you will represent contact with their local area or target group, a refreshing opportunity to leave the office and have a different kind of conversation, an opportunity to be creative, to give something back to society, to demonstrate their personal qualities in the work place or just light relief from the daily grind. Listen more than you talk on the first visit and find out what makes then tick. Help them help you to find out how you can give them something back – it maybe local respect, to fit with an existing charity programme, market research or just satisfaction in helping. Work out how you can achieve your goals without unacceptable compromise, but also provide value for the business. Building in a budget for good photographs to be taken which can then be published in a local paper could be invaluable for the business. Often you can write the article and it will be published intact. If you do this, ask to see the copy before it is published. Not doing so may risk your reputation and the hard won trust of your partner business.

Big businesses are very hard to crack –it can take years of relationship building - but they have big cash give away. Small businesses are a more manageable target (months) for small arts organisations, but have less money to share. My advice is to start approaching small to medium local businesses and gain know how and confidence. If you are looking for advice on beginning the process contact ’Arts & Business’ (http://interim.aandb.org.uk/ ) who run seminars, publish literature and can help you get ready to approach a business and then broker deals with you once you have found one who would like to support you.

As a postscript, after building careers in the UK with arts, education and technology organisations my husband and I are now running creative educational projects based on radio technology in Italy. There are few precedents here of arts & business working together to achieve socially beneficial educational projects and I’ve been pleasantly surprised at how much time people will give you to discuss you  ideas. We have brought together a bank, a local council, a junior school and two radio stations and are running a project which will bring the creativity of local children to an audience of millions. The young people have learnt new skills and soon they will be heard across two radio stations several times a day for the next six months. The School, Local Council and bank will benefit from exposure that is entirely innovative and reaches a wide audience. The secret is that everybody wins.

Links:

Arts and Business:            http://interim.aandb.org.uk/

Vital Regeneration:            www.vitalregeneration.co.uk

FreqOUT! Blog:            http://www.freqout.blogspot.com/

Josh McQueenie – Community,Culture and Commerce:

http://www.museumsaustralia.org.au/dbdoc/McQueenie,%20Jock%20-%202005.pdf

Creative Leadership Forum (Australia):            http://www.thecreativeleadershipforum.com/

Culture Awards 2008:            http://www.journallive.co.uk/culture-newcastle/culture-awards-2008/ › Continue reading

Join the forum discussion on this post - (1) Posts

Tags: business, commercial, FreqOUT!, funding, governement, Vital

Connecting

Wednesday, December 10th, 2008 | Conversations | 1 Comment

By Ruth Catlow

I have been a keen (if sporadic) blogger for a number of years, most regularly on the Furtherfield blog for reflection on media art- making it, curating it and translating it. I especially enjoy the way in which the format supports reflection on experiences, processes and ideas before they are black-boxed; while their forms and meanings are still taking shape. It has become natural to share this emerging stuff with other people with similar fields of interest. In this way we test the form and content of our ideas together from different perspectives and from geographically distant places, in a way that often gives rise to surprising connections and new directions.

Furtherfield.org are currently working in partnership with Drake Music on Connecting Across Difference, a season of creative music workshops with young musicians from mainstream and special schools in Tower Hamlets and Islington. The creative team includes composers (who lead on musical vision for the work), a music technologist (to support creative, light-footed implementations of assistive technologies for use by disabled musicians), a media artist and musicians. The season will culminate in a mixed media performance at Bethnal Green Museum of Childhood, co-devised and performed by all participants in March 2009.

The theme for the season is Connecting Across Difference. This theme resonated for both of our organisations and is intended to catalyse imaginative and playful explorations of the joys and the strains (or challenges) of encountering, communicating and coming to know people who are different; who speak differently, have different ambitions, interests, skills and abilities, or who have different traditions and histories.

One important aim of the project is to explore ways in which technology can support and enhance participants’ individual and social experience of music making. We are working with assistive technologies to create specialist instruments according to the needs and musical ideas of individual musicians.

We are also developing a project blog. This is a platform for sharing information, ideas and experiences during the project. It will provide a place where groups from participating schools can share their experiences and see their contribution as part of the whole project. They will be able to add images and sounds and ideas from the workshops to produce regular podcasts so that others can become inspired by their work. We are encouraging everybody to use it as a tool for connecting with each other: to promote discussion, sharing and understanding. As well as acting as a platform for discussion the blog is a source of information about the project, and will make it possible for friends and family to follow the progress of the project.

The blog (which includes a private forum for the creative team to discuss the planning and framework for the project) will serve as an archive of the project; a rich document of personal as well as collective experiences and learning. If all goes according to plan, it will also provide a site for ongoing exchange between project participants and extended networks of musicians. Also as a foundation for ongoing collaboration between musicians and technologists in the development of new approaches to instrument making and music making in general.

› Continue reading

Tags: access, blogs, connecting, difference, disability, Drake

People

Wednesday, November 12th, 2008 | People round the table | 5 Comments

By Melissa Bliss

The Venn diagram of art, technology and social change produces complex sets of relations. Projects that bring together people from two or three of these areas can have many stakeholders - those who hold the stakes in a wager, in an event of uncertain outcome, a gamble. My all time record was 17: me and another artist, the computer programmer, the commissioning agency, the host organisation and various funders including municipalities and state agencies. And the 10 or so participants, beneficiaries, who were not allowed to the table. I ended up drawing a diagram to work out who everyone was and what they wanted from the project.

We have all talked about the difficulty of taking into consideration - or even acknowledging - these different agenda. They may seem to limit more than enable. We can feel uncomfortable taking their dollar. But it is not all bad. It can be interesting to see how these people work, it can lead to unexpected opportunities and it can help to have people reveal their agenda. I would rather hear it from them face to face than reported. And in the end you can always walk.

We all expend our energy trying to define success and failure in a way which is meaningful to us and then negotiating them with the others round the table.

Who should sit at that table?
How do they know if I am succeeding?
How do I know?
› Continue reading

Join the forum discussion on this post - (1) Posts

Tags: Melissa

Epiphany

Wednesday, November 12th, 2008 | Epiphany | 2 Comments

By Melissa Bliss

When I am working on projects I hope for some kind of epiphany - for myself, for the others taking part. That I, we, will get some kind of insight, vision, deeper connection. That maybe an everyday epiphany - I cracked that problem - or an out of the ordinary experience. Crashing failure can be as revelatory. That is how I found out that animation is not for me, that I don’t function best in schools, that my programming skills will not always carry me through.

I also try to sow seeds. When I work with teenagers in London I take them to places they have never been before - to demonstrate that this city is yours - to places like (over the last year) their neighbouring national art gallery or the Masonic Museum or Channel 4.

Lois Weaver in her interview on Co-Pilot talks about the power of small victories - which we will all recognise - in a committed situation.

How can this be captured in a post-workshop questionnaire - Did you have any intense emotional experiences, on a scale of 1 to 5.

So,
Is a boring project where nothing went wrong a successful project?
Can failure be allowed to feel good?
Does art alone change lives? › Continue reading

Join the forum discussion on this post - (1) Posts

Tags: boredom, failure, Melissa

Time

Wednesday, November 12th, 2008 | Time | 3 Comments

By Melissa Bliss

Time is central to my way of working as an artist. I use time to try things out, go back over, see how it has worked out, try again - to change and move on. I don’t get it right first time and would not expect to. I work in long time and short time: ideas can develop over many years. My assessment of my work can also evolve over years.

Projects and organisations have natural rhythms which can be long or short. Music ensembles can work together over decades. I have run film making workshops that have lasted two hours. However for funders and agencies time seems to represent risk - and not of the bold, exciting, ground-breaking kind, but the I-can’t-justify-it kind.

Funded projects don’t often seem to allow for time - time for reflection or recasting or admitting to failure and trying again. I am often asked to work in short time: please come up with a proposal - for an art project, a workshop, a talk or some writing - in a couple of days. And then those projects may not happen for months. Have others experienced a strange mental displacement by the time you come to actually carry out a project - what was going through my mind at that time I proposed this?

In my experience the projects with the strongest social aims will often happen over the shortest time. If I am working with a teenager for a day taking photographs I may encourage in him increased self-esteem, a willingness to “re-engage”, to desist from certain behaviours - but probably only if he is on that journey already.

Time is necessary to make successful projects, to try different approaches, to fail and try again. Funded projects do not often allow this. These project seem like stepping stones poking above the flow of a creative life.

So,
How do we manage the pulls of long time and short time in a project-funded world?

How do we measure success when it can emerge over the long term?

When does time feel like risk rather than opportunity? › Continue reading

Join the forum discussion on this post - (1) Posts

Tags: Melissa

Success

Wednesday, November 12th, 2008 | Success and Failure 2003 - 2008 | 1 Comment

By Melissa Bliss

What do you think you have got out of this project?

What did you do?

What did you learn?

Would you recommend this to a friend?

How many people came to see your work?

How many came from the local area, the region, the national area?

How would you suggest this programme could be developed further for the future?

Since joining this project have you improved or increased you friends & networks, communication, confidence, self-esteem, team work or motivation?

Are you disengaged - curious - involved - achieving - autonomous - or moving on?

Please give two or more of your personal strengths. And weaknesses.

How do you see yourself in 5 years time?

Are you making a meaningful contribution?

How do you know if you are succeeding?

Does failure make you feel bad?

Any other comments (please use the box provided) › Continue reading

Tags: failure, Melissa

The

Monday, October 13th, 2008 | The Evidence Engine | 4 Comments

By Tim Jones

I’ve been working in arts participation throughout my professional life - which is beginning to amount to just a little longer than I can remember - and, especially when I consider the gains made since the early nineties, I see enormous value in the increasing prevalence and centrality of arts participation, of all stripes, in classrooms and at the heart of artist/creative organisation delivery across the UK. Yet, while celebrating its apparent rude health, I’ve long been concerned about the lack of critical reflection within the field; the understanding of political context, and the knowledge that we’re still a way off from being able to have unguarded, honest, warts-and-all exchanges, between ‘ourselves’ and beyond, that we need to in order to see clear, truly value in what participation in the arts can achieve. › Continue reading

Join the forum discussion on this post - (1) Posts

Tags: participatory