Community, networks, insiders and outsiders: organisational practice in our Arts Fund

Over the first two rounds of funding since we refreshed our Arts Fund, we’ve made 61 grants, totalling £13m. This new model, where we only had one round of funding each year, meant we could look at all applications at the same time and consider the portfolio as a whole. We shared some analysis after the second round of what we learned from being able to take this bird’s eye view. 

As we mentioned in that analysis, we want to balance this data-driven understanding of our grant making with an in-depth look at the nuance of how organisations work. In this blog, we look at some of the shared themes of organisational practice in our portfolio, using examples from work we currently fund.

An emerging and significant strand of work in the portfolio is making, and more specifically the role of making within community building. We are supporting a growing number of artists’ studios who are taking on a wider civic role, expanding the collaboration, reciprocity and creativity so often present in those spaces to play a more active and meaningful role in their places and communities. Already in the portfolio we are supporting Primary, Grand Union, Metroland Cultures, Strange Field and Studio Voltaire, and in this round we also awarded grants to Turf Projects and the Art House and Cubitt Artists. 

We also see this idea taking other shapes in other art forms. not/​nowhere​’s practice supports a growing community of film makers to develop their skills and reconnect with the radical and experimental film genres which emerged from 1970s analogue film technologies. Their programme of workshops, access to equipment, residencies and screenings immerse their members and wider community in this tradition, and their critical examination of labour and organisation means they are always interrogating, ​‘what do we need to sustain these practices?’

The narrative of Multi-Story Orchestra​’s transformation also speaks to this idea. The ensemble first formed to perform similar repertoire to other orchestras but took their shows out into unlikely spaces in Peckham and South London, running education and learning programmes in parallel. Despite acclaim and recognition for this approach from within the classical music world, they have since realised that the most meaningful work they can do with young people in the area is to treat them as equal participants in the creation of new music and this is what the organisation has embraced whole-heartedly in the last few years, only performing original compositions which are co-produced with young people. In doing so, they are stretching the idea of orchestral music and who makes it. 

For Glasgow Sculpture Studios, their role as a home for artists and as a fabrication and production facility has really shaped their engagement work, positioning their local collaborators as co-commissioners, co-producers and co-creators rather than participants and potential audiences. The below excerpts from GSS’s business plan exemplify this change:

The idea of networks is central to a number of the organisations we are supporting in the Arts Fund, both in how they work and how they plan to grow. 

The Work Room are an interesting example, fostering and supporting a network of freelance dancers from across Scotland. It was clear from meeting them that this network and the relationships, expertise and resources that exist within it are their best asset. They consider it their role to bring opportunities to the network and help them build careers which are not dependent on institutions and enable them to develop their practice. 

We were interested to understand how their thinking on de-growth – that is moving away from a model based on more consumption and activity – would influence their practice. Much of it came back to understanding their work as an ecosystem of collaborations, residencies, practice development and leadership development, all of which strengthens the overall health of the Scottish dance sector as their members develop new work, start new organisations or educate and influence the next generation of dancers.

Something to Aim For form the most unlikely networks through their work, bringing together grassroots artists, academics, anti-poverty workers, queer live-art performers and city council staff. Through these juxtapositions, they act as a facilitator for new practices to emerge and new knowledge to be produced, which we see positively impacting many different sectors. Although they work in different fields, their shape-shifting form is similar to Radical Ecology who we funded in round one. 

These networked organisations require us as funders to think slightly differently about how we understand and gauge impact, something we would like to learn with these organisations as we develop relationships with them.

Both Marlborough Productions and Kayd are lead organisations within their communities and started their work with a strong connection to place as well as identity. Marlborough Productions works alongside the LGBTQI+ community in Brighton & Hove, and Kayd in the Somali community in east London.

Both organisations speak to the insider-outsider space that they inhabit, borne out of their lived experiences. When we met with Kayd, they spoke of the hybridity of Somali culture and identity – distinct yet sharing traits with various east African, Muslim, Black and Arab cultures. The Somali community is the one of the longest-established Black communities in the UK, but invisible in so much of the discourse and data on immigration, diaspora and belonging in British society. 

What we learned from these organisations is how this idea of insider-outsider informs everything they do, not just in terms of the work they produce, but also how they see their own role within their communities. 

Kayd were very clear that they want to hold a critical lens to the community as well as to the way the Somali community is understood by wider society. They highlighted the need to confront conservative attitudes within the Somali community and to hold intergenerational conversations so that younger generations were confident of their place in British society while also being rooted in their Somali history and culture. The work they produce and commission speaks to this same hybridity and ensures that British-Somali culture continues to evolve. 

For Marlborough Productions, the very idea of queerness speaks to in-betweenness, exploring the spaces between predefined categories of gender and sexuality. They spoke about the possibilities which open up by stepping out of the faster-paced work of live arts and theatre and into heritage, affording them the opportunity to work at a slower and more reflective pace alongside their productions. The heritage work is more naturally intergenerational, uncovering and honouring the stories of Brighton & Hove’s older LGBTQI+ communities and connecting these stories to contemporary discourse. In their national work, Marlborough Productions are spreading these practices by encouraging other LGBTQI+ communities across the country to work similarly; to really explore their histories and reflect on where they’ve come from to inform the work they do now.

When considering the role that arts organisations play in social change, we often see organisations coming up against challenge of reframing identity in ways which reach can beyond the issue of representation. We hope that these examples demonstrate how this challenge can be navigated and the possibilities which it opens up, along with many others in the portfolio.

Looking back at these first two rounds it is clear how much of what we’ve learnt has emerged from the grant making process itself. Beyond the first stage of the application process, the Arts Fund has not been designed with rigid criteria, recognising that we can never be more expert in an organisation’s own work than they are, especially as we work across the breadth and diversity of the UK’s geography and artistic practice.

To navigate this, we try to see the fund as a space for two-way enquiry and an ongoing dialogue with applicants about the role of art in social justice work. It requires us to be attentive to what emerges from this dialogue and to continually reflect on our own role in this work.

These blogs are a way to surface some of this learning and reflection and to make visible some of the connective tissue which we think gives the fund its coherence. We think that the impact of our grant making is deepened the more we can give visibility to and nurture these connections and this will be an increasingly important part of our work in the future.