Charity Commission report highlights cultural activity’s pubic benefit
Four arts organisations at different ends of the size scale have been given ringing endorsements by the Charity Commission for their public benefit work.
The Royal Opera House, The Castle Players, Gwent Ballet Theatre - known as the Independent Ballet Wales - and the Young Concert Artists all have charitable status and have been assessed as exemplars to other charities for what can be done for the public good.
The assessments help to demonstrate that the public benefit principles are flexible enough to apply to very different arts charities in terms of profile, size and operation, yet clear enough to distinguish them from organisations which are not charities.
The commission’s report found that they “provide real examples for the rest of the charity sector, to help in their awareness and understanding of public benefit” it said.
“The arts charities have shown how they are accessible to a wide range of people, which confirms their uniqueness as charities” said Dame Suzi Leather, chair of the commission.
In an exhaustive appraisal, the commission looked at the Royal Opera House’s range of ticket pricing which went from £210 down to £4 in the 2009 season, to give ‘a wide range of ticket prices which will be affordable to those who cannot afford the most expensive tickets’. It also looked at other benefits, such as free lunchtime concerts, big screen broadcasts and schools matinees, training programmes and its complex and wide-reaching education activities.
Largely self-financing, the Castle Players is a community drama group based at Barnard Castle, County Durham, which each summer stages a play – usually a Shakespeare comedy - each summer in the grounds of the Bowes Museum, and smaller winter production which tour to rural venues. Ticket prices range from £14 to £1, and many seats are free, and 80 members, many of them participants.
Independent Ballet Wales, formed in 1986 and based in Newprot in Gwent, offers classes and workshop led by professionals and tour the UK and Ireland. They run workshops in schools and community centres, and in 2007-9 4,000 took part.
And the Young Concert Artists Trust (YCAT), also based in Covent Garden, which sets out to support and promote outstanding young classical soloists and chamber ensembles by giving them support and management, typically over a period of three to five years, to help establish themselves professionally. It also acts as mentor for finalists in the BBC Young Musician of the Year competition.
