Creative Community Companies

Creative Community Companies - models for the 21st century?

DRAFT of presentation to cultural policy makers at the CPPS seminar October 2009

Introduction Many of the discussions today are about public policies to support culture and creative industries through the recession. As an independent advisor, developer and change agent in the sector, I want to suggest to you some practical interventions which will make our local cultural organisations more effective. In particular, I want to hone in on local cultural governance. But first, a step back, to remind ourselves how we got here – and what has changed in the last 100 years.

From orchids to allotments and apples 100 years ago during the last fin de siècle, we were experiencing cultural change. The opulence of La Belle Epoque clashed with the ominous undercurrents of dissent, exploding with World War 1. Alongside the cultural movements of art nouveau, expressionism and modernism and the modernity of Kafka and Joyce, some connoisseurs during this time developed a passion for the orchid – some even developed 'orchidelirium' – ‘beyond addiction, and beyond hope’. The exotic orchid was a fitting motif for the cultural institutions supported by the state at that time - national galleries, museums and libraries. Look, learn, wonder - and don’t touch.

Other arts were left to the traditional forces of the Patrons and Punters and Free – private investment and support, sales of tickets and artefacts and the labours of love, blood sweat and tears of artists and volunteers. During the last century the nature of the artistic experience changed with social, economic and technological advances- with new platforms, new methods of distribution and consumption. The early 20th century optical, chemical, and thin-film manufacturing technologies converged with the practices of the visual arts and theatrical performance to establish the then new fields of photography and cinema. During the century further advances led to television, music recordings and of course, towards the end of the century, to the tipping point for some fundamental cultural changes - the internet and digital technology.

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At the beginning of the 20th century the role of the public sector was to support excellence and access in the cultural institutions of the time. Access to literature was enhanced by improvements in education and through the widening of the public library system, expanded by a private philanthropist working with the state – Andrew Carnegie. The 21st century equivalent is being achieved through the often unconnected actions of content aggregators, internet service providers, software developers and mobile device suppliers, private companies like Apple, Amazon and Google.

Some of the historic roles of the public sector in creating access to culture are being replaced by new, global enterprises and by the actions of individuals through collaboration.

We are in a topsy turvy world where the 4 ps of public sector, patronage, punters and free – the inputs of creative business -are being shaken into new positions. Take local news. As the 20th century models for the newspaper industry and local television collapse, the public is going through a process of re-valuing local news and journalists may become more important as publicly subsided workers than theatre artists or librarians. So whereas the 20th century was symbolised by the orchid, the 21st is symbolised both by the global Apple, a chic designed symbol of technology and communication and the hyperlocal, back to basics, dirty hands, communal and low carbon image of the allotment.

So what are the cultural business models for Apple and the Allotment that will be resilient and support new growth?

We are here to talk about public policy, and how the arts and culture can support regeneration and growth post the recession. But, while the business models may be different in the public sector to the private sector, the arts, culture and creative industries is a sector which depends on a balanced ecology where talented people can succeed in engaging with audiences to make creative experiences, creative artefacts and creative products. Public policy interventions in skills, tax incentives impact etc upon the whole sector.

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Creative businesses need to benefit from adapting to change - and being in the public sector should not prevent this.

Lets take a snapshot of some of the major emergent disruptive business models –Freemium, On Demand and Interactive. Freemium models, providing goods and services for free and then upselling premium services, are rocketing. Spotify, the legal free, file sharing music service has in less than a year, made available 6 million tracks and an Iphone app (a premium service) so suddenly all music is available free anywhere. Last week’s tie up between Channel 4 and U tube has made masses of content available free and on demand. Free, and premium, on demand access to books is offered not only through Google books and the Kindle but also increasingly by public libraries And games companies are up-selling to the ever increasing numbers of people playing interactive games.

In the private sector, faced with the failure of the old business models, companies have merged, liquidated, shrunk. Disruptive business models are often those to thrive in recession.

So how do we make sure that our talented creative people in the public sector respond to the new environment and create business models which will survive the recession? Models which, like the private sector, take risk, adapt to change and to the drivers of On Demand, Freemium and Interactive? Why don’t our local arts organisations merge for example?

One of the keys is local cultural governance. During the 20th century we began to subsidise artists, arts organisations and venues and towards the end of it we built up a complex system of machinery to support publicly subsidised arts - a multilayered bureaucracy, controlled, organised based on linear communication. It has ‘growed like Topsy’ to deal with new levels of compliance, like FOI, charity regulation, SORPS, data protection, disclosure and the like.

Mimicking the structure of governments and local authorities, many arts organisations discarded their grass roots or artist led structures and instead became charities with a board of directors and 3

a management structure. They have become agents of the public sector. In response to the increasingly tight demands for compliance, boards have taken decreasing amounts of risk.

But we now need to go through a process of weeding, disentangling and in some cases dismantling the machinery we have created and to create models for creative organisations which will be sustainable in the 21st century.

Within our cultural ecology we need a diversity of models, from the national/international brands which broadcast on multiplatforms to the formal and informal networks of individual artists, creative entrepreneurs and independents. A fundamental requirement is for local creative hubs, venues which are neutral, enabling, brokers, embedded within their communities and holding the ring for creative experiences from the local hands on to the global and digital. Watershed in Bristol is a well plauded and leading example, but there are others, smaller, like the Dukes in Lancaster which has moved away from being a rep theatre with a cinema to being a creative hub for Lancashire with a multiplex of facilities (and on half the arts council grant) and the Eastgate in Peebles (which is based now on professional volunteers).

So what sort of organisations can achieve this and maximise artistic, social and entrepreneurial success?

The key to unlocking change is to make changes in the way that we own, govern and lead our core, local, cultural organisations.

There is a huge wealth of skills and ability amongst arts board members, matched by some brilliant cultural leaders at the helm of our organisations but the system simply does not support them to develop their organisations.

The current system of arts funding and cultural governance suspends our arts organisations in some sort of aspic, resisting change and discouraging risk taking. We have created arts organisations which are not robust enough to lead change through setting them up as interconnecting components of public administration. Most are charities but, unlike charities which are accountable to their members, most of these charities have directors who are also the 4

only members, thereby never having the legitimacy of democratic election. Being unpaid as well as suffering from a democratic deficit, they often do not take long term responsibility and neither do they take risk. They are kept in check through a bespoke system for arts boards governance and investment is made in publications, training and the like. There is a push for increased diversity on boards, but the reality is that this a pretty elite system with board members almost always well established in the community and the system being pretty inaccessible to newcomers.

Why don’t arts organisations get together and merge? Because the current artistic directors don’t want to, and the boards neither want to upset the directors nor put their heads above the parapet nor get their sleeves rolled up.

Why don’t some of the high experienced business people and entrepreneurs on boards apply their skills to generate income for the organisation? Because that is not their role, as charity trustees, and their ideas must pass the taste test of their arts executives.

Tomorrow’s local or regional arts organisations must be embedded in their communities and must be dynamic, risk taking and take a high level of responsibility for success.

They should maximise local entrepreneurial skills and community engagement. The charity model does not support this and so a new model would be to develop Creative Community Companies, cultural Community Interest Companies. CICs are limited companies, with special additional features, created for the use of people who want to conduct a business or other activity for community benefit, and not purely for private advantage. This is achieved by a "community interest test" and "asset lock", which ensure that the CIC is established for community purposes and the assets and profits are dedicated to these purposes.

A CIC can be set up with a mixture of members, representative and individual. The key thing is that all the members are working within a structure which exists to service a particular community.

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The Creative Community Company would be set up to serve the interests of all those in a local arts and culture and creative community – creative practitioners, artists, participants. The CCC could govern all the infrastructure or some of it, accepting that its job was to provide the best creative and cultural experiences and products for its community and that is likely to involve continually evolving and changing.

Board directors would be accountable to their community of interest and would include executive directors - paid for their professional services and taking full responsibility. An executive Chair, rooted in a community, could lead change and provide robust and dynamic leadership for the organisation long term. Local authorities, enterprise agencies, universities could all be members and would serve therefore without any of that awkward conflict of interest that can exist in the current system.

We could harness the skills and enthusiasm of some of the volunteers currently serving on board in more satisfying ways - as cultural champions in schools, for example. With fewer and small professional boards, the focus for the staff, artists and volunteers can be on creating and supporting the activity and less on convoluted governance matters.

The CIC vehicle is used by Culture and Sport Glasgow and Watershed’s Ished amongst several others, and the model offers an opportunity to change the dynamic of art organisations and to add both entrepreneurialism and community ownership. As our communities become ever more diverse and in the future maybe more so with migrant populations, the CCC model can be designed to be genuinely porous supporting creative hubs which offer neutral space for all collaborations.

And the Creative Community Company can adapt to change. Who knows what will emerge this century or even this month as a creative interactive experience, or what Spotify, Google, Apple and people we don’t know yet will do?

We need to break the stasis and a crisis may be needed for this. So far the arts have argued well their case to national governments. But with the pressure on local authorities, its only a matter of

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time before parts of the system begin to collapse. The Creative Community Company can be the phoenix for future growth.

© Anne Bonnar October 2009

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