THE OTHER POINT OF VIEW

Dea Birkett, director of Kids in Museum, was at the Whitechapel opening too
I don’t like to boast, but I was at guest at the uber cutting-edge opening of the newly refurbished Whitechapel Gallery, although I was probably the only person in the mwa-mwa throng dressed in high street. The fashion on conspicuous show was intimidating, with Originality and Impracticality in evidence in equal measure. Never mind the art, it was the artists and their milieu we were all asked to gaze upon.

But I did manage to catch a glimpse of some tall sculptures standing in the gallery, most of them seeming to be made of old concrete blocks and discarded picture frames. They looked rather like the sort of constructions local kids on my street make of the discarded building junk, which might well have been the point. They were also, like our street sculptures, very tactile. But, unlike our street sculptures, we weren’t supposed to touch them.

Kids in Museums is naturally very interested in the “Don’t touch” debate. We’re talking to museums and galleries about how young people can be guided in finding ways to interact with objects that should not be fondled. Point 10 on our Kids in Museums Manifesto is – “Teach kids respect, for the objects and other visitors. Help them to learn there are things they shouldn’t touch.”

So I was curious to find out from the gallery assistants patrolling the sculptures at the Whitechapel how they would prevent them being tapped by toddlers and stroked by ten year olds? I asked several assistants to imagine I was a child with an outstretched hand which looked as if it might, at any moment, land on one of these works of art. “I’d go up to you and say, ‘Don’t touch, please’,” said the first assistant. So I went to a second, and put the same question to them. “Don’t touch!” was the answer, without a please this time. “Our job is to make sure no one harms the art” they continued.

And there was me thinking their job was to assist the visitor, whatever their age.

I don’t have a problem with a gallery assistant asking anyone not to touch. But I do have a problem with them saying that first, and with it being the only thing that they say. I would like some recognition from the gallery assistant that the reason the young person – or any person – is reaching out towards a work of art is because they are responding to it. Isn’t that what the gallery or museum wants them to do? So how about starting their interaction with the miscreant visitor by saying, “Yes – it’s a really exciting piece of art, isn’t it? I like it, too. How about taking a look at it from back here, so it doesn’t get harmed and you get a better view?”

I put the suggestion of starting with such an uplifting comment to one of the gallery assistants. They replied, “But our job is to keep the art safe”. They clearly didn’t understand what I was going on about.

It’s a mystery to me, as a museum visitor, why gallery assistants aren’t simply taught to make their first words positive, rather than a reprimand. Then the visitor won’t leave feeling they’ve been told off, but feeling they’ve been valued. It would take two hours training – maximum - to have every assistant signed up to such a simple, welcoming, inclusive script.

Apart from anything else, only saying “Don’t touch!” just doesn’t work. Shortly after the Whitechapel opened to the public it was reported that, “a young boy, overcome with excitement, managed to knock over a monumental Totem Sculpture by Germany’s leading contemporary artist Isa Genzken, whose pieces are on show in the main gallery downstairs. One witness described how the six foot exhibit teetered, wobbled and fell”. Some members of the press seemed to somehow hold Kids in Museums responsible, as if we urged children to rove around galleries doing damage. Of course, that’s absurd. What we urge is that museums and galleries interact positively with children and young people, welcoming and valuing their responses.

And what this single incident at the Whitechapel demonstrates is that saying “Don’t touch” doesn’t prevent harm being done. Let’s rewrite the conversations gallery assistants have with visitors, then they’ll be no disgruntled kids and no more teetering Totem poles.

You can download a copy of the Kids in Museums Manifesto from www.kidsinmuseums.org.uk, or order a free printed copy.

Its birth was troubled and it almost didn’t survive to celebrate its third birthday, yet the Wales Millennium Centre has just unveiled a triumphant fifth anniversary programme.

The Wales Millennium Centre was pretty restrained about announcing its five birthday celebrations, but it’s a big programme with the almost inevitable Bryn Terfel, Valerie Gergiev, both Matthew Bourne and Mark Morris, the first sighting in Wales of the musical Les Miserables, a new musical based on the group Take That, and the input from residents at the centre such as Welsh national Opera and the BBC National Orchestra of Wales

But there’s been no press conference about what will happen in the celebratory month of November, no producer named, almost no congratulatory quotes from key politicians and celebrities. All that is being saved for later, says the WMC’s chief executive, Judith Isherwood; there’s still work to be done. For now, a simple press release would do.

The truth is that if it was a triumph to get the huge £106m lyric arts centre open in 2004, it has been at least as great an achievement to have kept it open.

Eighteen months ago the place was £13.5m in debt, facing insolvency and closure, with its auditors, KPMG, casting “significant” doubt about whether it could continue as a going concern.

Now it looks forward to its fifth birthday, clear of debt and actually working to a surplus when it had seemed to be one of those ill-starred millennium lottery milestones that was going to be an eternal embarrassment.

Ill-starred because it had been expected to be opening in 2000 as the Cardiff Bay Opera House, a crystal palace of a building by Zaha Hadid which would launch the derelict bay area into a glittering future. The design was turned down and the Millennium Lottery Fund, because the perception was that however much Wales is the land of song, opera is not the art form of the people.

A new competition was launched for a multi-discipline performing arts centre that would be host to both visiting shows and residential creative organisations, residents from the august Welsh National Opera to Touch Trust, the arts organisation working for and with those with autism and profound disabilities - there are eight in all. Even then, funding was thin and the Welsh Assembly had to be bullied into providing as much as they did, which was still inadequate.

But Cardiff-based architects, Percy Thomas, were appointed, and Judith Isherwood was brought from the Sydney Opera House just a year before opening.

It was a frenzied year which got the place open on November 26, 2004, followed by three years of holding two ends of the budget in outstretched fists and failing to make them meet.

It’s a complicated picture, Isherwood says, involving the £10m donation from the South African Donald Gordon which was to be paid over five years, other capital receipts coming in staggered over periods, and a woefully inadequate revenue grant to run the place. The centre was operating a turnover of £14m a year with a subsidy of £750,000, about 6%, which compares with the Lowry and Sage at around 20%.

“Once the true costs of running the building and of building an audience and maintaining commitments to all of our operations, we started to run a deficit” she says, and it took about three years for the Welsh government to get its time frames in sync with the WMC’s, while the latter was serving loans at £1m interest a year and its debt ballooned to £13.5m.

She praises the board of the centre at that dark time, who had to consider not only the viability of the centre itself but there own personal liability as charitable trustees, and it was this that crystallised the political thinking, so that at around the third birthday the £13.5m was written of by the Assembly, and the subsidy went up to £3.7m, or 26% of turnover, “in our view a comfortable level of funding – not generous but not skimping, and it allows us to do the things we have always aspired to”. They have just entered the second year of the new arrangement with what she calls a substantial surplus.

But through all the tribulations, the centre has been doing its job: the programmes have been varied, innovative and popular, audience has been building, and the residents have been largely content (an awkwardness about publicity bearing the names sponsoring businesses in competition with the centre’s own has been resolved, Isherwood assures).

“Prior to opening a lot of nay-sayers inside and outside Wales felt the size of the market and the chequered history of the project probably meant it was not going to live up to its expectations, and its kind of exceeding all those expectations.

“At 1.5m visitors a year we’re coming up to 6m since opening, which is so far beyond what any of the myriad consultants advised on”. The overall view had been that if ticket sales could get to around 300,000 and casual visitors to 250,000 they’d be doing pretty well for the size of the South Wales population of two million. But tickets are at 360,000, nearly capacity, and the casuals are coming at a rate of 1.2m a year.

“Why? Well, the bay itself has taken off, the completion of new Assembly building (which opened on St David’s Day 2006 having cost £67m) has created a heart in the bay that people do want to come and visit. And out building has been successful as an iconic building - like Sydney Opera House, many people refer to it in that way”.

There is still work to do. The centre itself was only phase one of three, and second opened in January: the Hoddinott Hall, named after the Welsh composer Alan Hoddinott who died a year ago, which is the new home of the BBC National Welsh Orchestra which cost £16m. A third space needs to be developed, at a possible cost of £14m, for which there is time-sensitive planning permission, which could be a thrust stage theatre – there is not enough rehearsal space in Cardiff. On May 5 the Arts Council of Wales moves into the centre, making it even more of a hub for the arts of Wales: Isherwood is working with new partners in central and north Wales to give the WMC more of an off-site presence throughout the principality.

So while she and the WMC may seem a little coy about the fifth birthday, the autumn events will be truly celebratory. Cape Town Opera’s unique production Porgy and Bess will be part of it, marking an association through Donald Gordon – the once thriving company has been all but strangled by slashed subsidy, and its survival and continued innovation is thanks to such partnerships. The WMC also has a five-year association with Gergiev and his Marjinsky Theatre ensembles which has been renewed and there will be concert performances from them, Karl Jenkins wrote the opening music for the centre, and to mark his 60th birthday this year there will be a concert of his work.

And there is, I fact, an early encomium from Bryn Terfel, reflecting the legend written by the poet Gwynneth Lewis carved in Welsh slate and set above the main entrance: “In These Stones Horizons Sing: five words that sum up five magnificent years” he has written. “The centre is an inspiration to artists, audiences and the world. Five years is just the beginning. As we wish Wales Millennium Centre the happiest of birthdays, we pray its horizons will sing forever.”

AI PROFILE: Michael Lynch CBE, CEO Southbank Centre

When Michael Lynch arrived at the South Bank Centre at 8.30 one bright summer morning in 2002 to start work, the place was locked. He had to call security to let him in.

“Then I sat in my new office and by 12 no-one had darkened my door, so I just walked the building going into people”. In one office he announced himself as the new chief executive, “and someone said ‘blimey, we haven’t seen one of those for 14 years!’ I thought it was an English thing that everyone expected to be summoned rather than turn up.”

He found a largely inert organisation whose 350 staff had been there an average of 15 years and was not equipped for the huge task the board had set him. In five years he was to have transformed the organisation, brought the Festival Hall from the 1950s into the 21st century and created the world class concert hall it had hitherto notoriously failed to be.

There had been a series of development plans by previous administrations all of which had come to nought – “it killed so many careers” - and he found that the jewel of the centre, the Festival Hall auditorium, was barely in existing plans at all. But the building was near to being closed: if the boilers which had seized up that summer had done so in the winter or if the asbestos had been found then instead of in 2006 during the refurbishment, it would have been.

“One of the architects said to me, ‘you haven’t been a very good client’, and that was a galvanising moment for me: the architects and acousticians had been working on it for eight and nine years, but we hadn’t developed enough sense of what the project was going to be, and we were being guided by all sorts of other players (on his first day he was handed a list 58 stakeholders, from the Arts Council to the South Bank Users Association) rather than the initiative being shown from here.

“If I’d been appointed for five years I needed to get on my bike and make sure I had a group of people around me that could find a way to raise the money. My task would finish on the 21st August 2007. It was pretty tough.”

Michael Lynch had had a varied career when he arrived. A politics gradate of Sydney University, he worked for the Australia Council of Arts before going into theatre management, being the casting director for the Crocodile Dundee Films, becoming director of the Australia Council and then in 1998 chief executive of Sydney Opera House, turning around that ailing organisation in time for the Sydney Olympics for which it was to be the cultural nub.

Here, he gradually changed the executive structure at Southbank, bringing in an operating officer “to do the things I’m not so good at”, and later an artistic director. “The chairman, Clive Hollick, had only been appointed for three years (Hollick’s tenure was later extended to 2008), it was a monumental task and we had to get it moving” he says.

“We went through a complete change, and in some cases a number of changes over the six and a half years. Then we had to go through significant convulsive changes in a whole lot of other areas, particularly in 2005 when we made 181 people redundant for closure, and then again as we prepared to reopen in 2007 to get the organisation in shape for what it was then going to be post reopening.”

When he arrived the scheme was valued at £54m, and as he leaves it has doubled to £118m, thanks to rising costs but also to greater ambition which involved creating money-making outlets on the riverside, and a new administrative building by Hungerford Bridge to free public space in the hall. It had been his decision not to skimp o0n the acoustic and spend an extra £20m on it.

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In 1987 Robert Hewison’s controversial The Heritage Industry: Britain in a Climate of Decline showed how a boom in museum openings indicated Britain, having destroyed its industry, turning to the past to manufacture a completely misleading future. This week, in a keynote address to the English Heritage conference, he revisited the theme, we have an extract.

If The Heritage Industry: Britain in a Climate of Decline forecast terminal decay, I was clearly quite wrong. We are still here, and until recently the economy was booming. Now, as we seem to be approaching conditions similar to those of the early 1980s, what has changed since 1987?

First of all, the Heritage is no longer in Danger. In the 1980s, one of the ways in which something came to be seen as part of the heritage was that it had to be under threat. A hundred factory chimneys was prosperous pollution, ten cold factory chimneys were an eyesore, but the last factory chimney, threatened with demolition, was a proud symbol of the industrial past.

But it is plainly not enough. The Taking Part survey (the government’s garnered data about engagement and non-engagement in culture) shows that the heritage is still largely the preserve of those who have been lucky enough to have educational, social and physical mobility. The Scottish Household Survey of 2007 tells a similar story. In Scotland in 2007, 79 per cent of those holding a professional qualification had visited a heritage site, compared with only 32 per cent of those with no qualifications. I have to say that it is not just access to the heritage that we should be worried about. There is a devastating report from the Arts Council, which also analyses the Taking Part statistics. It has the rather odd title From Indifference to Enthusiasm - odd, that is, until you understand that what the Taking Part survey tells us is that most people are indifferent, and only 4% of the population can be called enthusiasts. 84% cent of the population fall into the ‘little if anything’ or the ‘now and again’ groups.

The message about the arts is the same as what I believe is the message about the heritage. I quote: ‘Two of the most important factors in determining whether somebody attends arts activities are education and social status – the higher an individual’s level of education and social status, the more likely they are to have high levels of arts attendance.’

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‘Male, pale, stale’ - arts boards

Roy Clare, chief executive of the Museum Libraries and Archives Council, makes no bones about it: the boards of museums and galleries are generically “male, pale and stale” – white middle-aged men – “and it just isn’t good enough”.

The difference, he says in an interview with Simon Tait, is not so much between the heritage sector and the visual and performing arts, as between the public and private sector, and the crucial factor is Nolan – specifically, the rules about appointments to boards following the Nolan Committee report on standards in public life.

Nolan was concerned to eradicate the “tap on the shoulder” process of recruiting to the boards of public bodies, to ensure appointments on merit. But what is happening is that the “pool” from which board members, particularly for national museums and galleries, is drawn has solidified. “So the inherent problem in the public sector of self-generating ruling class maintaining this ‘male-pale-stale’ environment in governance” he says, meaning that too few women, two few young people, and many too few from the black, Asian and multi-ethnic sectors on boards (BAME).

The effect is that the many different stories a museum collection can tell that would appeal to the growingly diverse sectors of modern British society are not drawn out, because of the boards’ un-diverse make up. “We’ve got collections really with huge potential to represent diverse stories, but the governance of the board does not reflect that” he says. “That’s the key starting point for me”.

It is changing, however. DCMS has an advisory board on heritage comprising the likes of Clare, Carole Souter of the HLF, Mark Jones of the V&A and National Museums Directors’ Conference, and English Heritage CEO Simon Turley, which recently presented a key paper to the head civil servant in the department, Jonathan Stephens. “He has reacted positively” Clare says, and in April the first ever networking session involving chairs and chief executives from the sector will take place at DCMS.

“The private sector has got more freedom in terms of how to appoint trustees, and that freedom when used well can extend to bringing onto a board people who can make difference for you in one sector or another. Private sector charities have brought in very imaginative people who wouldn’t compete under Nolan for public sector jobs” Clare says.

AI Profile: David Kershaw, group chief executive of M & C Saatchi and chairman of the Cultural Leadership Programme

David Kershaw’s introduction must have been like walking into a governance nightmare for a businessman, even one working in the cultural industries.

The model he was used to has the board appointing the chief executive, the chief executive hiring the staff, with the board answerable to the shareholders. He found himself on the board of an organisation in which the shareholders were also the employees who hired their own chief executive.

“You’d think it couldn’t happen, it was crazy” he says, “but it was also very exciting – we had a marvellous time.”

Not many set-ups compare with the governance pattern of the London Philharmonic or the capital’s other independent symphony orchestras, and while the boards of arts organisations can be idiosyncratic there are also many fundamental likenesses with governance in the business world, as Kershaw has discovered.

“Most of my life has been spent in the grubbier commercial world and clearly there are distinctions between there and the arts, but the fundamentals are not that different: the boards decide the ultimate direction of what the strategy of an organisation should be, and I guess both in the commercial and cultural sector there’s an interface between the boards – non-executive directors in business, trustees or governors in the arts – and the executive which is the lynchpin that determines whether an organisation works or doesn’t”. There can be crucial differences, however, so that it is vital to find the right chairman who understands the cultural world and can fit into an easy partnership with the chief executive; this can take time and an exhaustive trawl that does not rely on the services of headhunters.

And the key nuance is risk.

“It’s what boards spend most of their time talking about” Kershaw says. “In the arts, risk defines what the organisation is about, and then getting clarity of strategy about how you’re going to fulfil that mission”. The board’s job is to ensure the arts organisation is in the best state to deliver on the risk.

“But you don’t find people sitting around a commercial boardroom saying ‘why aren’t you being more experimental’, you certainly don’t have your shareholders saying that. The greatest challenge to a cultural board is how you balance the accounts and the risk, and it’s also the most interesting aspect.”

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The theatre was going ‘down the Swanee’ until the partnership of Alistair Spalding and Chrissie Sharp got a grip. The partnership is ending with the project floating triumphantly free.

Five years ago Sadler’s Wells was beleaguered, losing money, audiences and its reputation as the unofficial national theatre of dance.

Its chief, Jean-Luc Choplin, had ambitions to establish opera to the venue and bring “a major performing arts company”, but he had just announced he was leaving to take over Paris’s Le Chatelet. Shortly after the chair, Denise Kingsmill, also quit, and the place which had reopened in 1998 after a £48m rebuild was starting to look like another lottery white elephant.

“We were losing money at a rate of £50,000 a month, because there were certain bits of the programme which were overambitious but also because Jean-Luc made some big changes to the staffing structure so that key posts missing, like the marketing director” says the then artistic director Alistair Spalding, “and we are 70% dependent on box office – if you take that main function of marketing away then it’s pretty tricky, so the sales were going down the Swanee”. It only survived by digging into its reserves.

Now its bank balance is healthily in the black, the Wells is overflowing with enthusiastic young and old audiences and it has just announced its latest manifestation of confidence, taking the brand off-site to art galleries, theatres and even warehouses.

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NEW COLUMN
Dea Birkett of Kids in Museums with The Other Point of View

Randy Klinger, director of the Moray Art Centre
The Moray Art Centre, on the Findhorn Coast in North-East Scotland, is one of the country’s newest cultural institutions, an award-winning eco-building devoted to visual art and “generating a community of creativity”. The 11-year vision of its director, Randy Klinger (winner of the 2006 A&B Individual of the Year Award), it was opened 2007 having cost just over £1m, and it was a fundraising exemplar.

What was your vision?
To bring beauty to each individual as a physical experience of joy and soul’s upliftment, the “aesthetic orgasm”, to create an inspired environment within a centre for visual art, education and appreciation, that attracts national and international artists from many art forms, away from pressures of the urban marketplace. This rich cross-disciplinary, cross-pollinating environment will teach by inspiration and osmosis, as well as by technical means.

Today, for example, I am in London finalising an exhibition of Italian Renaissance drawings from The British Museum, a first in Scotland, and our musical advisor, Anthony Rooley, director of the Consort of Musicke, is researching the scope of opportunities for musical events that will expand upon the themes of the many exhibitions that we are now planning. The Swiss government has also requested us to create an exhibition/event under the theme of “Exporting Genius: Switzerland sharing its cultural Influence from New York to Moscow”. This will be a three-part event in the Arcola Theatre, London, the Tramway, Glasgow, and The Moray Art Centre.

£1m for a new building it seems remarkably good value. How were you able to keep costs so low?
The new centre has been planned to be a vibrant and motivating environment, which allows people to meet, discuss and generate a community of creativity. it has three rentable teaching studios, four individual artist studios, a community gallery with meeting and study areas and a main hi-spec gallery; nine flexible-use spaces in all, 500 metres squared of usable creative space and another 500 metres squared of ecological, organic working garden surrounding it. Much good will has been attracted and many people have been touched directly by it. We built the art centre exactly, (to the penny) on-budget, on-spec and on-time.

More than half the money came from private individuals. How did you raise it?
Well, I never asked for a penny. I never used the word “need”. What I did was totally radical: I magnified my vision into as grand a vision as ever there was and I inspired people with what I call the “depression aesthetic” and the onset of the next golden age,.

Did you have professional advice?
When I needed financial advice I contacted A&B and asked, “Can you get me a volunteer board member with financial skills?” “No”, they said, “You’re in rural Scotland, for God’s sake!” Then two days later Arts & Business called back and said, “The group director of Lloyds TSB is wanting to volunteer”. William Powrie has been on our board now for six years. I needed someone with legal skills in employment law. Again, I contacted A&B and two days later they called back and said, “The head of employment law for the Aberdeen Council wants to volunteer”.

Our board now has eight members and 14 advisors, covering education, government, IT, PR, law, banking, finance, arts – all directors or heads of their organisations, all at the top of their game.

How sympathetic to the vision were your architect and builder?
I arrived one day and the architect, Greig Munro, of a small local firm, Affordable TM, said he’d decided to change the surfacing on the gallery from cladding to lime-render. ” What colour will it be?” I asked. “It’ll just surprise!” he replied. The builder, Ivan Russell (Russell Construction), came every morning with his collie-dog and built the foundations with his own hands. The project manager, Rob Ferguson, would show up, unannounced, at 6 am before an exhibition opening, tweaking this and repairing that, unpaid, unrequested, unseen. Our architect donated 3% of his fee to the project and our builder gave £10,000 towards the building we were paying him to build.

What sort of activity does the centre host?
A dynamic programme of participative courses and classes informed by a diverse exhibition programme is central to the operation of the Moray Art Centre, which aims to act as a central hub of facilities and information on an international level. Activities include international cultural exchange programmes and summer schools; professional creativity training for organisations and business; consultancy in how to build an ecological civic building; arts holidays; classes; film festivals; musical recitals; an artist in residence programme; exhibitions; a young people’s programme; art for under fives; symposiums and conferences; and a resource library.

What kind of response have you had?
We have had approximately 15,000 local visitors and 5,000 internationally in our first 18 months. We have 20 partner groups and have received local, regional and national interest in the press, radio and TV. Local business have donated £25,000 for the young people’s programme, £5,000 for the children at-risk programme, use of hire-vans to transport art, food and wine for exhibition openings and sponsorship for exhibitions.

Are you still fundraising, and if so what for?
We are the only centre for excellence in the arts in Scotland totally unsubsidised, but we are never inhibited by money: we see what we want to create, then find the money for it. We want to train 30 new volunteers, to start “Growing Teachers” programme, upgrade the museum-quality gallery, develop a creative arts programme for adults with mental health issues, we need ten laptop computers for our young people’s professional animation and graphic design programme, a production company to design and create a presentation DVD, we need to develop our new music programme bringing in local musicians as well as international artists like Sir Peter Maxwell Davies.

FUNDING PARTNERSHIP SPECIAL, IN ASSOCIATION WITH ARTS & BUSINESS

AI Profile: Verity Haines, arts director, Arts & Business

“Pragmatic! A word I absolutely adore, because that’s what fundraisers are” says Verity Haines. “Fundraising is problem solving; it’s sorting stuff out; it’s not being frightened of a brick wall, they’ll find away round it. They are lateral thinkers, innovative and creative, all the things we hope business men and women will be in future.”

The word arises at first simply as a description of the new Arts & Business logo, no longer a whimsical, voluptuous A&B monogram but the plain, full-out name in a no-nonsense typeface. It is a signifier for the new approach, or “new offer”, Verity Haines is presenting to the cultural community.

She is A&B’s new national arts director, the first in its 32 years tasked personally with forging close relationships with arts organisations across the country in order to help them forge close relationships with sources of funding.

Haines’s own early career had been at the BBC where she was a studio manager for the nightly Kaleidoscope arts programme on Radio 4, editing tape as the programme went out live. But the BBC is an uncompromising place to work when you’re bringing up two small children, and she left to go into, first, educational welfare – “good for your powers of persuasion” - then found herself fundraising for Save the Children, and went on to do the same with national and international organisations such as Cambridge University (for enterprises such as he Fitzwilliam Museum and Kettle’s Yard), the Arts Educational School at Tring, the National Film and Television School, the Central School of Speech and Drama, the Young Vic and the Royal Society of Arts.

“I learnt skills in fundraising from each of the organisations I worked for” she says. “People move around the fundraising sector to develop skills because no one organisation is big enough to train you and move you up to the next level, so I learned about volunteers, growing regional groups, local community work with Save the Children, the trading side with Oxfam because it’s the best organisation in not-for-profit trading, then with Church Urban Fund when she helped the church interface with the corporate sector for the first time.

It is an increasingly complex job, a long way from simply persuading a marketing director to part with some budget underspend for a night out at the concert or exhibition for clients.

But why has this important task fallen to A&B rather than the Arts Council, or even kept within DCMS? It is down to A&B’s very independence, not even at arm’s length, she says, “which is valued and respected in the sector”. They work closely with ACE and other funding organisations, “but nobody else is delivering high end training, learning and development for the cultural sector, and we have 32 years of history and knowledge in the area, so we’re ideally placed to provide the right arts offer within the environment”.

Determined fundraisers are made of pretty stern stuff, Haines says. “They know they are going to need well honed skills of diplomacy because they are going to work with intellectually driven passionate individuals, they know going to have to analyse their project, and will always have people looking over their shoulders to see how they’ve much raised”, and that’s just as true whether the project is a brand new arts centre or simply keeping a theatre’s doors open.

“So they have to be extra good at long term planning, and they very much need good information which is what our private investment research gives them” she says.

They also need advocacy with their own organisations, “because probably the most difficult stumbling blocks they have will be internal rather than external”, and fundraisers are often badly undervalued in their families. Non-fundraisers often have no idea how long it takes to build relationships with individuals, and expectations on boards and in executive teams in cultural organisations are often a long way from what is actually achievable. There is considerable skill in telling the unvarnished truth, and having it accepted.

For that reason, Haines says, it is important for an arts organisation’s fundraiser to be at the heart of the organisation, “not down the corridor somewhere”.

And this is not just about recession. The need might be particularly poignant now, but a good fundraiser will know who does have money now and who doesn’t, and be able to build relationships with people who have nothing to give now but will have money again later. “If fundraising is killed off at this juncture it will take several years to get back to where they are now, whereas if they keep the operation going, albeit on a slightly more refined model, they will be ahead of the competition when they start again.”

So the offer is a fundraiser’s toolkit: the training, the knowledge and the contacts arts organisations will need to fill that vital bag of income – not just from the corporate sector but from trusts and foundations and the growing sector of philanthropic giving.

A&B’s new website, being launched in the spring, will enable people to audit their own fundraising skills as a start. “What often happens in fundraising is that you snatch and grab bits of training here and there, and as you get up the ladder you may be sending people for training and not getting much yourself” Haines says. “So there’s entry level, mid-term and high end career training that’s needed.”

There will be various “How to” guides to be downloaded, but also live masterclasses and workshops with experts in various fields across the country, related to specific regional needs and fed by regional A&B directors and their contacts.

Specific topics might be building a legacy programme; how to bid for funding or, to use the jargon, “making the ask”; training senior volunteers “to give and get”; examples of best practice, with people to sharing experiences and innovative ideas that work. “And then a large noisy debate every year – I love debate because it puts air into whole thing so people are not just being lectured to”, and this would be open.

Boards need to be educated, too, and the board bank – whereby the corporate sector “lends” a director to an arts organisation – is being cultivated again, but not in a patrician way. “I regard it as an enormous privilege for an individual to be sitting as trustee of a cultural organisation, not a question of filling a seat and ‘giving their time’.

“It’s about finding out how they can be most effective, how they can be an advocate, how they can help raise funds if that’s needed, and being proactive. In some cases you can see really appetite for that, and then you’ll see an organisation moving forward quickly” Haines says. “Where you don’t see that appetite, it’s often holding an organisation back.”

The offer is modelled on the feedback from A&B’s online consultation last year, and the modelling will never cease as long as requirements and practices continue to change. Also in the spring, A&B will launch its Cultural Champions programme to recognise the work and contributions of both fundraisers and givers around the country, complementing the long-standing annual Arts & Business Awards.

The importance of the individual has been driven home with the boom in personal giving – the latest figures show that philanthropy in the arts rose by a staggering 25% - so the new Price of Wales Arts Philanthropy Medal has been devised, with Prince Charles presenting the first in January at Buckingham Palace.

Philanthropists need careful nurturing and constant care to ensure that they have what they want from their generosity. Last year A&B created Culture House, a club for philanthropists. “It’s about getting them to be advocates of that process and talk to their own peer group to encourage that kind of giving – for the very simple reason that they find it very exciting, it’s more exciting than making money.”

The dictionary definition of “verity” is “a true principle or belief”, and it suits his Verity perfectly. “It’s an exciting rather than a depressing time for A&B for two reasons, first because the arts sector in the field needs pragmatic help and they can provide it. “And the one area I am absolutely convinced is a strong part of what Britain can deliver is creativity. We don’t know it in Britain, we’re hopelessly bad at recognising it, but we’re extraordinarily good at this and creativity in Britain is not going to go away, so we couldn’t be better placed to do what were doing now. It’s absolutely A&B’s moment.”