TAITMAIL Heritage’s survival – and how to feel intended
Almost no sector, with the obvious exception of the NHS, has suffered more from the effects of Covid lockdowns, central and local government funding cuts and the cost rise crisis than heritage and art. Art in education has all but disappeared, theatres and museums have been forced to close, creatives have had to resort to the hospitality industry to live.
Out of it all, though, has come an element that is transforming a vital corner of the cultural world, and will have a long-standing influence on how we operate: collaboration and professionalism.
It’s under the radar most of the time; individuals and smaller organisations that have come together thanks to Zoom or informal networking, and even when it’s fully in the public eye, it’s hardly noticed.
Like Heritage Compass, which has just produced an impact report on its four years of existence, which is devoted to the heritage sector, of course, but its lessons can be learned throughout the cultural quarter and beyond.
It’s an initiative that has provided mentoring, survival grants, and training in resilience and financial security for practitioners and smaller operations. It’s led by Michelle Wright’s Cause4, the social enterprise she set up in 2009 that works across the arts, sports, charity and education domains on income generation, fundraising and programme development. Heritage Compass has funding from DCMS and the National Heritage Lottery Fund, with practical support from the Arts Marketing Association and Creative United.
Since 2020 it has forged more than 200 mentoring partnerships, handed out resilience grants worth £150,000 to 34 organisations and run 169 training sessions. “A belief in accessibility has underpinned this work throughout” she writes in the report’s intro, “with almost half of applicants provided with bursary support to be able to take part in the programme”.
It was supposed to be a brief, recovery-mode package to last two years, but extended with new funding from the government and the NLHF, with a new website (https://www.heritagecompass.org.uk) and more money, a new partnership with MyCake, the financial benchmarking agency that links experiences, and a new business planning training programme.
Image shows Ditchling Museum of Art & Craft
It used to be, in times of reliable subsidies when there was at least one source of guaranteed income for many, that cultural arts organisations were on their own uncovering extra funding, with artistic directors finding themselves as principal (untrained) fundraisers and spending valuable time lost to the rehearsal studio or workshop to woo potential philanthropists. Whatever expertise they developed they learned from personal diligence.
Since 2020 creating income supplements has not been the main preoccupation: now, that would be survival.
What Cause4 saw was an urgent requirement under the new circumstances for a professional approach, not from consultants and advisors, but from inside the organisations themselves, and even individuals.
Resilience is the mot juste for what Heritage Compass was set up to provide, to embed new and hitherto uncharacteristic skills. It has helped develop practical business plans, provide fundraising abilities and financial hardiness, develop income generation, find new audiences, crucially build support networks and collaborations, and develop new partnerships – more than 400 individuals have been connected across the country.
Vanessa Woolf’s London Dreamtime takes adult story-telling to festivals and museums as well as schools and nurseries, which joined the Heritage Compass programme to learn market development and how to respond to audience appeal: “I have found new and better words to explain what I do to outsiders” she explains in her testimony. “I have changed my working methods and admin. I’ve even opened a business bank account, adding in a delightfully accurate turn of phrase, “Overall, I feel much more intended in everything I do”. The Black Heritage Wales Network said the Compass had been “an in-depth, demanding programme that understands the sectors’ needs. It has really pushed and challenged the Network to produce a real vision and robust plan for the future.”
The heritage industry, however, is going to need all the resilience it can muster, according to a new British Social Attitudes survey, which shows that while as a nation we express great collective satisfaction in our sporting achievements this summer, we’re becoming less enamoured of stories from our own heritage – the report records a 22% drop in those declaring pride in British history.
But that can be to heritage’s advantage. The historian Alan Lester, author of a new book on empire, believes it is not disinterest that is been invoked by the report, but discernment, with the biggest influence on the change being Black Lives Matter.
“It shows an awareness that history is complicated” he says, “that Britons have done both remarkable things and deplorable things in the past, and we need to break down history into the kinds of things that we see as sources of pride and those which we need to move beyond.”
So not less curiosity about our past, rather better informed interest, providing our museums and heritage organisations with another new challenge. To meet it, the impact report says, participants in the programme had attracted new funding and diversified their income, developed a more positive organisational structure, equipped boards with new governance skills, broadened audiences, developed new partnerships and become more strategic in their planning.
But the needs remain, and Heritage Compass has officially ended. Instead the new website offers a legacy, with benchmarking with MyCake, and guidance with key reports and case studies, plus a governance learning programme through Cause4 and online fundraising training.
“The programme’s training has helped organisations secure funds critical to their survival” says Michelle Wright. “Additionally, an emphasis on collaboration has created support networks which have energised the sector, supporting both well-established and newly emerging heritage organisations to revise and create effective strategies.”
http://www.heritagecompass.org.uk