“What are the biggest opportunities facing the arts and cultural sector today and how should we, as a grant maker, respond?”
Before we get to the opportunities, we have to acknowledge the difficulties that the sector has faced because of the covid-19 pandemic and the soul searching that continues in the aftermath of the Black Lives Matter movement. The sector’s workforce shrunk by 30%, staff at some of the largest organisations have unionised and the whole contract of experience with audiences was transformed. As the sector adjusts and recovers, I think that there are three big trends which have emerged:
increased scrutiny and activism within our largest cultural institutions on the issue of social justice, especially racial justice. Workers within these organisations are pushing for their leaders to close the gap between their diversity & inclusion rhetoric and their policies and actions, through collective and direct action.
audiences and participants are more willing and able to directly support causes, organisations and artists that they are interested in, either through crowdfunding, subscriptions or donations.
a growing number of self-employed people are running organisations working in the cracks and the margins of the traditional arts and culture sector, often led by people from marginalised communities and building networks and audiences of like minded people. There is also evidence from the Policy & Evidence Centre that groups of local creative and cultural organisations have actually done relatively well throughout the covid-19 pandemic.
All of this points to a more even distribution of power and resources across the sector, and an intellectual leap forward in our understanding of power and social justice. The sector is now looking critically at how every aspect of its structure creates and sustains a hierarchy of taste, class and privilege, from funding to programming and from marketing to evaluation. Diversity is no longer a binary issue of representation. There may not be consensus, but there is a critical mass, and the opportunity for funders is to lend their resources, expertise and influence to this critical mass to create sustainable change.
So, how should grant-makers respond to this opportunity?
The first thing they need to do is embark on their own journey of reflection. How do grant-making processes and norms entrench the status quo - is the language used open and inviting, are there any intrinsic biases that we need to account for, how wide are networks of advisers and consultants, how are rejections managed? I know that this work is already part of PHF’s approach, but it’s a long journey and one that requires regular reflection, consultation and iteration.
Next, grant-makers need to ensure that wherever they are supporting established institutions to produce participatory work, that the practice is at the heart of the project. Are the applicants really engaged with the participant group? Do they have the expertise or lived experience to connect with them and offer them an enriching experience? Does the proposal serve the needs of the organisation or the participants? Grant-makers have a responsibility to ask these questions and they need to do so to foster change in existing organisations.
Grant-makers should give sustainable core funding to organisations which are modelling new approaches to curation, programming, audiences and income generation. They should be given some of the security which larger institutions have had for years so that they can experiment, take risks and engage their imaginations in the long-term.
Finally, grant-makers should support their grantees with evaluation which scaffolds their work rather than distracts them from it. This means working with them to embed learning practices into their workflow, creating space for regular reflection and investing time and effort into sharing this learning.