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.”

The governance conference organised by the Cultural Leadership Programme sounds like one of those worthy but seriously dull events enjoyed by nobody but the organisers, but this was different: it’s thrown up fundamental faults in the running of the arts in this country, and specifically about the relationship between board chairs and chief executives. The idea is, of course, that the two enter into a blessed marriage of the kind, we’re told, enjoyed by Wylie Longmore and John McGrath at Contact Theatre in Manchester. But that’s a rare good one, it seems. In national museums, particularly, if you think about it, the fall-out has been spectacular, with the last three directors of the V&A, the last director of the Natural History Museum, of the Science Museum, of the National Gallery and the National Maritime all unexpectedly resigning or not being reappointed by chairs brought in from outside, mostly from business, with little or no knowledge of the cultural sector. The only place where it seems to have worked the other way was at National Museums Liverpool where David Fleming got the better of Loyd Grossman last year. The natural question is, where is DCMS in all of this mayhem? Aside, as ever, even though appointments to nationally subsidised cultural organisations are normally by the government. But if you thought that common sense was beginning to prevail, the madness is spreading into the foundations sector, apparently, with the sudden firing of David Barrie. He staunchly will say nothing, beyond the party line that ‘17 years is long enough, time to find new challenges’, but the word is that he has not been as one with his chair, the old Etonian banker David Verey, since he took over in 2004. The conference story about Verey is that he was asked whether headhunters should be called in to find Barrie’s successor and responded ‘Why? We know everybody, don’t we?’ Meanwhile, the awarding of the Art Fund Prize for museums, always a May presentation, which Barrie championed, is to be held on June 16 - a fortnight after Barrie has left.

A truly historic moment with the decision by Nick de Jong to retire as theatre critic of the Evening Standard. He succeeded a legend, Milton Shulman, and became one himself if only for the fear and loathing he engendered among theatre directors - mostly, it must be said, not very good ones. It was a surprise that he had written a play, even more of one that it was particularly good - where did he get the time? - and astonishing that it should have been as spectacularly successful as Plague Over England has become, with film rights currently being negotiated. His departure has nothing whatever to do with the arrival of the Standard’s new editor, Geordie Greig, of course. The two know eachother well - their careers overlapped briefly when De Jong was the arts correspondent of The Guardian and Greig was doing the same job at the Sunday Times. No drama there, then.

Interesting trend that the wives of our leaders should be taking on a role as mentors of the cultural community. Mrs Darling, the chancellor’s wife, is the latest to have summoned leaders of the arts world to informal discussion about how to carry the arts through the recession, but I wonder if she had the right guest list. Christopher Frayling is the former chairman of the Arts Council, John Tusa the ex-managing director of the Barbican, and Jenny Abramsky no longer the head of BBC Radio…

Nice to know that after 14 years of existence, the London Gay Symphony Orchestra is finally getting acceptance by the arts establishment. On May 2 they are to make their Festival Hall debut - albeit in a rather aslant way, to perform the European premiere of Sing for the Cure, a symphonic song cycle chronicling stories of breast cancer survivors, as part of the Various Voices festival. But it’s a start, even if a late one, and you can hear how good they really are six days earlier when they will be essaying Tchaikovsky, Wagner and Poulenc a few yards from the RFH at St John’s Church, Waterloo.

The future of Derby’s Grade II listed theatre, the Hippodrome was thrown into uncertainty again following an application to demolish part of the building to make way for a multi-storey car park, office and retail complex.
Owner Christopher Anthony plans to build the car park behind the existing frontage of the theatre, but promises that those parts of the building which have not been irretrievably lost, are structurally sound and contribute to the local street scene will be retained and internal decorative plaster work will be restored “as far as practicable.”
Parts of the venue were demolished by last March before the city council ordered a halt. However a council spokesman said that the council could not force the owner to use the building as a theatre. “We are, however, trying to facilitate a realistic and practical use for the building.”
Theatres Trust Director Mhora Samuel said, ‘How will a multi-storey car park bring Derby Hippodrome back to life as a theatre or provide any cultural benefit to the City? The Theatres Trust would object strongly to any application that proposes this. To lose the building in this way would be a total tragedy.’

Museum directors fear that Britain may fall behind as a venue for cultural tourism. Mark Jones, chair of the National Museum Directors Conference, has written to Culture Minister Barbara Follett and to Christopher Rodriques, Chair of VisitBritain, welcoming the Government’s renewed focus on tourism and recognition of the contribution that culture makes to UK tourism.
But he adds that recent figures suggest that in 2007, for the third year in a row, visits to London’s major exhibitions declined in relation to those in Paris, Tokyo, New York and Washington. NMDC has also raised concerns about the ageing visitor profile and Britain’s failure to attract visitors from emerging market.
The NMDC has asked for government action to attract visitors from these markets, and wants Visit Britain to use marketing initiatives to bring in new audiences for museums.
In their letter, NMDC also calls for improvements in public transport links, particularly to museums outside central London, and the completion of the Exhibition Road project to improve visitor access to the Natural History Museum, Science Museum and V&A.

Managers at the Sage in Gateshead have agreed a pay freeze on staff this year in the light of the economic recession.
But the move, which was outlined in a letter to the venue’s 335 staff, comes after a successful close to 2008 at the box office. Takings were up on the same period in 2007, said Sage executive director Anthony Sargent.
But he added that, although box office had been good in 2008, takings were beginning to level off. In a normal recessionary cycle, discretionary spending on the arts tends to lag behind.
“We have to be prudent. This has only happened after a long consultation process with the staff and we have not ruled out reinstating it later in the year depending on actual recessionary impact, and staff know that.”
He added that a number of other arts organisations nationally and regionally were considering similar moves and others were even contemplating laying people off.
• The future of Newcastle’s historic Journal Tyne Theatre has been assured with a £100,000 grant from English Heritage to carry out urgent repairs to the roof. The theatre, a Grade I-listed building which is on English Heritage’s At Risk register, has also been handed over to a new trust, the Tyne Theatre and Opera House Preservation Trust. The trust will oversee a fundraising campaign to raise £7m by 2015 to fully restore and revamp the theatre which first opened in 1867.

The Scottish Government has dropped plans to transfer responsibility for the creative industries from Scottish Enterprise, the country’s economic development agency to Creative Scotland.
The decision will mean that up to £300 million of funding will not be directly available to Creative Scotland, the new body formed by the merger of the Scottish Arts Council and Scottish Screen. Instead all agencies involved in the creative industries, including Scottish Enterprise and local authorities, will be expected to work together on the basis of a framework laid down by ministers. Only the Scottish Cultural Enterprises office, with a budget of £100,000, has been transferred to operate under the Creative Scotland banner.
Launching the framework, Scottish culture minister Linda Fabiani said Creative Scotland would have “an advisory, advocacy and brokering role”, in developing the creative industries in Scotland, which are estimated to be worth £5.1 billion and which supports 60,000 jobs.
Ms Fabiani admitted that SNP controlled government had broken its 2007 manifesto pledge to transfer the budgets for the creative industries from Scottish Enterprise to Creative Scotland . “When you are in opposition you don’t get all the facts,” she told a press conference. “I am perfectly content to say we listened and we learnt from that listening. This agreement means everyone is clear about their role.”
The move has come under fire from critics who point out that the rationale for the merger was to create a body with overall responsibility for creativity in Scotland. Opposition MSPs have questioned whether Scottish Enterprise or Creative Scotland will take the lead in funding artists. And a petition signed by more than 400 artists and writers last month attacked the merger plan, saying the rumoured £7 million costs attached to setting up the new body will lead to cuts in grants.