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The situation: a kind of climate crisis, a kind of inaction

In 2010 Arts Council published my early paper on resilience in the arts sector, Making Adaptive Resilience Real. Mission Models Money also published Capital Matters. This set out in stark terms how lacking most cultural organisations were in working capital and financial resilience.

The two papers together make for interesting but depressing reading today.

It's now clear that 14 years of Austerity, COVID and the fracturing and fraying of social infrastructure have created a perfect storm within the cultural sector. The ongoing viability of many organisations and individual livelihoods feels fragile.

The closures are becoming more frequent. The canny shifting of levers is also starting to show in programmes. The potential resets of that first lockdown summer are fading, as summer memories do. The blank sheet was not so blank. The reserves built up (by some) are shrinking. The debts incurred (by others) have yet to be repaid.

And yet, this is should not surprise us. It is to the arts sector as melting icecaps and more frequent 'weather incidents' are to the environment: a climate crisis emerging from long-term change and our seeming inability to act.

What makes an organisation or a sector creative and resilient?

To consider creative resilience– the phrase I adopted when revising my frameworks for the book Tactics for the Tightrope, published by Future Arts Centres in 2021- we need to think not simply about individual organisations but about sectors and sub-sectors, about ecologies or infrastructures. The characteristics that tend to lead to creative resilience are as much ones of a system, collective and communal, as they are properties of individual entities.

At all levels there are factors which I consistently observe. Building a strong culture of shared purpose and values is central to these. Ideally staff, artists, audiences or participants and funders all buy into the same idea of what an organisation does and what it stands for. (Where those diverge, issues can develop.)

That shared purpose creates consistent or growing demand and income, giving greater ability to predict finances, cover core costs and build unrestricted reserves for strategic use when need or opportunity arises. From that position organisations and sectors can contribute to and benefit from strong networks.

Confidence in a sector's power and agency also helps, as do effective leadership, management and governance. Resilient sectors change their situation by leading or contributing to sectoral and local developments that improve the environment rather than simply responding to it. It helps people create assets and practice that supports income-generation, social benefits and creative activity.

Creative practice is integral to resilience and vice versa. Neither is an add-on in service of the other. The strongest organisations and sub-sector sectors see their resilience as a creative practice. They make, produce, problem-solve, innovate together, in collective efforts. (Future Arts Centres is a good example of this, creating peer learning opportunities that generate models of new practice.)

Encouraging resilient behaviours

So how might funders and commissioners encourage these behaviours?

If you’re a funder or a local authority, the temptation to seek applicants who balance the budgets whatever the knock-on effect whilst simultaneously tackling complex cultural and social inequities, creating jobs, revitalising high streets, and cutting costs to the health service changing the world can be overwhelming. you might be tempted. It might even be reasonable and necessary for you to do so. (The pressures on funders are also part of this picture.) But the stubbornness of those issues may prove greater than the resilience of the potential solutions. The traditional culture sector fairytales of world-changing impact or improved viability – told in advance in applications and with hindsight in evaluations – are no longer fit for purpose.

Here are four suggestions for funders (and implicitly for those seeking their investment):

• Invest in collaborative and collective resilience-building, including place-based or sub-sectoral/specialist networks
• Invest in individual organisations based on commitment to mission, focussing more on building organisational capacity for the long-term (including covering core costs during that process), than on buying outputs and outcomes
• Focus on developing asset-based mindsets and skills that create ongoing revenue and community involvement, activities, including use of loans and other investment models such as bonds
• Invest not on an asset-by-asset basis but on the basis of building a resilient cultural infrastructure for communities, places and practices, informed by strong intelligence and audit of the relevant landscape/ecology.

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