Welcome back to the @QMUL day of our #CreativeEconomy Networks - Research, Policy and Exchange event in partnership with @brBritish, @NetworkCentre and showcasing research funded by @ahrcpress and @NewtonFund and with the support of @Culturarj. Morag Shiach welcomes delegates ...
@QMUL Principal Colin Bailey shares his pride in Queen Mary’s three-cornered achievement in research, public engagement and the diversity and quality of its student body. As an engineer, he pushed hard for #CreativeEconomy’s inclusion in the UK Industrial Strategy.
Partnerships allow creative entrepreneurs to contribute in all kinds of industrial sectors for everyone’s benefit, and we’ll be focusing on them today.
Now @MJDowle takes over, prefacing the day by observing that one of the great advantages of the creative economy is that it doesn’t require a great deal of infrastructure to open up opportunities for employment to people everywhere, particularly to young ppl in peripheral areas
The new #CreativeEconomy programme from @brBritish will invest around £1.2m with a strong focus on how we can link together CE and social enterprise, for social as well as economic benefit. And we’ll discuss this further today.
John Newbigin, from @creativeengland, has captured the podium and is ready to fight off challengers to introduce Eduardo Saron, the Director of @itaucultural.
Eduardo Saron remarks that since the first Lula government of 2003, Brazil's cultural policy has been directed by one principal paradigm: access. And fifteen years on, we can now see that access alone is not sufficient. We need to be developing not just access, but participation.
The cultural right to participation is guaranteed not only by Brazil's constitution but also by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and by the UN Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights of 1966, which came into force ten years later. Everyone has the right ...
... to take part both in their own individual cultural life and in the cultural life of all. Of course this right to individual cultural expression is a major challenge for public policy: how can it reach down to the level of individual acts and activity?
A right, of course, is not a duty. An individual can choose to exercise their right to participate in the cultural life of others - of all - but can also choose not to participate.
Definitions of access vs. participation: 
It's when I make the move into participation that I move into a space of not simply tolerating my fellow citizens but into respect for their culture and for their rights. We need the values of tolerance and respect to sit side by side.
Another slide illustrating the next important policy step: clarifying the link between participation and the right to life - to a full life, including creative expression, culture and art.
Let's be brave and say there is no real life without culture and art. And in order to guarantee human rights, as policymakers we need to encourage and grow participation in society - so that people become genuine subjects of their own transformation and of their own culture.
In Brazil, we're trying to step away from metrics such as numbers of people through the doors (which proves little about their participation). We've been guilty too in the past of surrounding the art with costly spectacle, such as fireworks shows - driven by market forces.
This has had a distorting effect and we need to get away from it. And thirdly, we've seen a lot of focus on costly new buildings, often in major cities such as Rio de Janeiro, Sao Paulo and Minas Gerais, while existing cultural buildings in less prestigious areas are neglected.
How many of our rural libraries have we restored with these kinds of budgets? The Lei d'Incentivo/Lei Rouanet [tax incentives that allow Brazilian businesses to give part of their corporation tax to cultural projects via sponsorship] has had a commoditizing effect on our culture.
We need to step away from these practices and look instead to: Training; Fostering; and Fruition as a new set of paradigms for public policies for cultural action that will genuinely produce new subjects, the protagonists of the transformation of themselves and their environment
And in the coming generation these subjects will transform history - because they are not content with the place that history has put them in.
An inspiring start to the morning! Eduardo Saron of @itaucultural is followed by @Sarahdrinkwater of Google Campus: 'Google's hub for founders and entrepreneurs to learn, connect, and build companies that we hope will change the world.' It operates in both London and Sao Paulo.
Campus London is proud to have created 4,200 jobs - very diverse workers - and raised over £194m in investment funding. How have they done it? Sarah says: Don't underestimate the power (in London) of meeting over a hot drink. They built a cafe!
Every Monday, there's an orientation session where people can meet peers who look like them and crucially are at a similar stage. Not a hero who's achieved everything already. is 25 years ahead of you and doesn't look like you. Exchanging knowledge with peers is v valuable.
And people can set up their own events, easily, to network, meet people and share ideas.
When Sarah first started at Campus, she found there were very few women in the community and those who were, were in a similar age bracket: 20-21. Why no women over 40? they make great founders of companies! So they began a project called Campus for Mums, targeting ...
women (and men) who were beginning to have a little more time for themselves after a period of childcare.
When expanding, Campus identified five cities to open new centres; Madrid, Sao Paulo, Seoul, Tel Aviv and Warsaw. One of the special things about Sao Paulo's city culture is the way it brings different groups together. Why is this special, Sarah asks?
Well, because groups can do what individuals can't. We need to get away from this myth of the solitary genius inventor and move towards cultural democracy. It's both the enabler of change and the result of change.
What changes are we seeing in the worlds of life and work? Lifelong learning: flatter hierarchies and weirder workplaces ... people investing in experiences, as much as in things.
An important observation: you never own a culture, or a collaboration. And it's incredibly hard to predict the future. So stay flexible, but focused: and keep human.
In the Q&A, John Newbigin picks up on a phrase from Eduardo Saron's presentation: "not expecting a particular outcome". It's so important we resist the instrumentalization of cultural learning & dig our heels in to protect young people's rights to creative learning & development.
Eduardo Saron agrees that the humanities are losing space in university curricula in Brazil too - this is a huge risk to the makeup of our intellectual thinking around the world. He takes the example of algorithms. Of course, they're here to help us and free up our brainspace ...
... but they mustn't take over decisionmaking in a way that negatively affects our lives. We need legal frameworks and mechanisms for them - secular algorithms, if you will, that hold spaces open in our lives and in our schools for creativity and fun.
It's important to develop people's humanity through formal education, but it takes time. We can do it a lot faster through culture, which can reduce the gaps between generations, genders, between minorities and majorities in society.
Responding, @sarahdrinkwater comments on the way that the move to a paid model for university education in the UK has made students and graduates focus on outcomes, because of the transactional nature of the relationship.
Messages are lost in education - we focus so much on coding, and work skills, that we forget to tell children, As an adult, you'll delight in working in friendship groups. You'll enjoy doing some things that you aren't very good at, but you'll still do them because you love them.
John Newbigin of @creativeengland jokes that measuring GPD in terms of productivity per hour is a skill robots are very good at. (he's quoting a source I missed) What human beings are good at is wasting time, playing, and creating things.
Now John turns a piercing gaze on Sarah and asks her, as a Google representative, about corporate responsibility and good corporate citizenship. What changes does she see coming? @sarahdrinkwater agrees that we have to understand there will be bad actors in any sphere ...
... and we should expect to see the products of increased thoughtfulness from large tech companies.
Eduardo Saron adds that capitalism isn't a mechanism to reduce inequality - if we want to face this problem of modern society, then we need to act with purpose, and demand this of others/corporates too, through public policy.
Among the questioners, we have Simon Dancey from British Council's @CulturalSkills Unit, who posits that Brazil has a unique opportunity to invent a new cultural paradigm that challenges the field of Power.
Eduardo Saron is reflecting that our poor understanding of how to create meaningful statistical information that can improve our understanding of the impact of arts and cultural activity creates problems for the cultural industries and also for society at large.
Literacy/reading surveys in Brazil reveal that 50% of the population haven't read anything in the past 3 months. And he's not talking about books - anything at all. What if a government took this as a KPI for its own performance on culture, as they do with health, or education?
John Newbigin reminds us that the term "Creative Economy" is simply a terrifyingly successful branding exercise undertaken in 1997. It's not _a_ sector, it's a series of tiny very specialised sectors. But now we're out of time, so the lively discussion moves to the coffee table.
Very interesting discussions over coffee over the tension between private corporations providing quasi-public spaces for cultural activity with permission, and genuinely public spaces in which anyone has the right to expression. Lots of challenges for the UK as well as Brazil
Ben Rogers, Director of The Centre for London research centre, introduces our next panel, with a focus on how policy in the creative industries can stimulate socio-economic development.
Our panellists are: Aline Cardoso, Sao Paulo Mayor's Secretary for Labour and Entrepreneurship; Paul Brickell, Regenerations & Community Partnerships for LLDC; Lucy Oliver-Harrison, who's just stepped down as Executive Director of @YardTheatre in Hackney Wick ...
... undergoing its own development challenges at the moment, as we heard yesterday; and PPP Associate, Samenua Sesher, now a freelance consultant and coach, but bringing her experience of setting up a London Borough cultural service in Kensington & Chelsea to bear today.
Ben is taking us on a whistle-stop tour of the regeneration of London's East End and Docklands, and the ways that's not only facilitated the creation of one of the world's most significant financial services sectors, but both opened and closed spaces for artists over the years
... and of course the growth of service industries capacity has been a powerful contributor to the social inequality we also see all around us in the East End. Lots for our panellists to pick up on here.
Our first speaker, Aline Cardoso of Sao Paulo's city government, begins by marking some personal sadness at being away from Brazil on Labour Day - as Secretary of Labour, she feels she should be working.
Some stats about Sao Paulo: the wider metropolitan area hosts 10% of Brazil's population, and generates 18% of Brazil's GDP. This is a city that operates on the scale of some countries.
As we look at a picture of the informal housing structures of a SP favela, Aline observes that this is where we need to be looking for new creative entrepreneurs, because this is where the population is concentrated, and creativity has no colour, class, gender or nationality.
Central zones of the city have fewer residents than jobs - while suburban areas have 1 local job per 39 inhabitants. This reflects both the concentration of businesses in downtown areas, and also the geographical inequality that the city houses ...
... and which any public policy needs to address. But it's not just about "centre" vs "outskirts". We're looking at two maps of the city area showing the index of social vulnerability mapped onto municipal areas, vs. the availability of formal work in the creative industries ...
... which reveals an almost exactly inverse relationship. According to the World Economic Forum the #CreativeEconomy sector: Can play a radical role in the stabilisation of local economies against external shock; Can generate inclusive economic opportunities and social cohesion;
so it's key for city government to develop local economic strategies to promote growth in the #CreativeEconomy.
Now some shocking statistics about the level of young talent going to waste in Brazil:
Here’s a summary of the policy actions São Paulo is taking to combat this.
And the "Criado em Sampa" [Made in Sao Paulo] initiative with @brBritish under the Newton @NewtonFund working with @nesta_uk and @adesampa_sp, which has already run 40 workshops and trained over 650 entrepreneurs from vulnerable territories in SP to foster their business ideas.
Our Chair Ben Rogers comments on his admiration for the way the @LondonMayor has really put culture at the heart of his agenda here, for instance with Creative Enterprise Zones, protection for cultural buildings etc.
Next speaker, Paul Brickell, is from @noordinarypark London Legacy Development Corporation (henceforward to be referred to as LLDC for the same of my fingers). He feels development has to lean on the past and on an area's history even as it drives change forward.
He's drawing a comparison between the many ways Victorian industry in the East End used cows - for milk, meat, bone china, and candlewax - and the fertile mix of industries in places like @HereEast, across the canal from our @CreativeWick venue for yesterday's discussion.
Surprisingly, we're designing and making things again in an area of London where we thought we'd forgotten to do that. But one thing we haven't got right yet: how do we make this part of London work for vulnerable communities? How do we connect local young people in ...
... to the new opportunities and the highly skilled jobs that are coming in to this area? Without exception he's seen that the companies coming in to the area are hungry to tap into a more diverse pool of talent by creating work & training opportunities for local young people.
We're definitely not talking about unpaid internships here. We're talking about opportunities to work, learn, and earn a wage that can help to support yourself and your family.
Why is the artistic and creative community special to Hackney Wick and the wider East End? It's about the collision and cross-fertilisation between larger industries and universities and this small, lively artistic community. So how do we do this?
First and foremost, build in low cost workspace within the spaces that are built. You have to have a relationship with the landowners and developers that won't allow them to wriggle out of this type of planning commitment.
Second, you need to work hard to strike the right balance between the intense need for affordable housing and the need for affordable workspace. Housing need will always tend to trump other development needs - it's hard to hang on to these workspaces.
And it's also vital that it's local communities that are able to be in the thick of change and to lead change.
And the baton is handed over to Lucy Oliver-Harrison, who's surprised to be talking to us about 'Making Policy Work': she thought she was just running a theatre. A great theatre! @YardTheatre was converted from in 2011 at a build cost of £6k and using recycled materials.
Policy support was essential to its founding and new policies such as The Agent of Change are now enabling them to protect their late night bar licence, crucial to both @TheYard's financial sustainability and its cultural life.
From the beginning The Yard worked closely with local policy, and that's seeded the development of a locally focused programme that's thoughtful about the opportunities it offers to local young people.
Now that its space is due to be developed and it's looking for a new home, Section 106 will be the guarantor of @TheYard's future, together with its Hub67 community space.
Lucy reflects on the discomfort of competing with affordable housing for space: but we can't build communities without community spaces as well as houses.
Ooh, here comes @merisesher with three challenges. You ready? First up: we can’t talk policy without mentioning politics. Change at the top can totally derail your plans.
Second: industries like oil work on 30-35 year timeframes. The cultural industries need a similar ability to plan strategically. How do we set up a local policy framework that supports this?
And third: housing is at the centre of this, because housing drives private development. We need to start requiring private developers to make real commitments to understanding the culture of local areas they’re building in, their character and needs. And make a contribution.
Ooh, my thread’s got tangled. Sorry about that. That was the third of @merisesher’s points. Hope we’re all still on track.
some advice from @merisesher for arts organisations about how we can avoid contributing to gentrification: Intelligence and generosity in your hiring. The “Farrow and Ball” arts organisations we all know could be in a different country to the genuinely local grassroots groups.
From the floor, we hear that the displacement of community initiatives and resources like youth training centres in the wake of urban development (e.g. the São Paulo cablecar) in Brazil isn’t called “gentrification”, but “disappropriation”.
Another really acute comment from the floor about the gatekeeping of access to cultural buildings: yes, we need to address inequality, but does that have to be within a deficit model? It’s so negative to be asked to prove your credentials via your deficiencies.
But in London we’ll always need indoor spaces, because the weather’s too bad to make all our work in parks. So we need them to be better mediated. @LibertadorCymru chimes in with a demand for more varied accents among the white middle-class voices of our UK arts establishment.
Now another questioner asks for more information from Aline Cardoso on how #CreativeEconomy projects actually protect communities and build resilience against external shocks?
Aline responds that innovation and the ability to find new creative solutions to challenges is crucial, as is the way the #CreativeEconomy focuses on & is driven by people’s needs and desires.
Diversity, says @merisesher: we need a-whole-nother symposium. Economic background (class) is important but let’s not forget disability diversity, alongside ethnicity and gender.
And @merisesher points us to the virtues of the development consultation structure invented in the 1980’s, the ‘community panel’: it was somewhat successful in forcing developers to learn to hear community desires and needs, and to respond to them in their developments.
Our after lunch session is chaired by Tom Fleming, who’s been working with @brBritish and @NewtonFund to promote creative and social entrepreneurship and extend the reach of skills among more diverse communities in Brazil.
Tom’s been fascinated in this project to begin thinking about the careful way UK and international models of creative & social entrepreneurship need to be adapted to succeed in the Brazilian reality on the ground.
A neat illustration of this is provided by the 3 speakers on this panel from the same national organisation, @sebrae, which works at national and state levels and also has thematic teams, e.g. focusing on Tech and Innovation.
Our first SEBRAE speaker, Ana Clévia Guerreiro, is from the National office and has been working in a project that matches @brbritish investment from the @NewtonFund with @sebrae ‘s own resources.
Ana Clévia’s slideshow is a tiny window into the richness and diversity of cultural expression in Brazil. We’re now looking at some of the beautiful craft work generated by @sebrae’s national prize, TOP 100 de Artesano. Do pop over to their website for a look, they’re stunning.
Ana Clévia notes that any initiative to develop creative and social entrepreneurship needs to combine some actions that generate quite rapid positive results, with a longer-term strategic framework that supports planning and works towards security and sustainability.
Now we hear from Ana’s colleague Vanessa Fagá Rocha, who’s doing her bit for the tourism industry in the State of Alagoas by showing us some simply stunning images of pellucid waters, caves, beaches and historic buildings. 90 Brits have just added Alagoas to their must-see lists.
Vanessa wears her heart on her sleeve and her love of Alagoas on her T-shirt, which is made by a local SME. She’s very proud of their REDES CRIATIVAS ALAGOAS project, supporting small- and micro- creative enterprises across the state.
One of Vanessa’s first actions at @sebrae Alagoas was to ban “people in suits” in videos intended for creative entrepreneurs - who found these images alienating. To run a successful programme, you have to show you understand the people it’s aimed at.
Listen to the craftspeople up and down the State. SEBRAE’s forums have heard from a woman who said that participating in the programme ended her marriage ...
... because it finally gave her enough economic independence to free herself and her children from domestic violence. These are the stories you will hear if your work is reaching the places where economic participation changes lives.
Our next speaker is José Carlos Aronchi, who’s in charge of Technology & Innovation for @sebrae ‘s State of São Paulo team. He’s telling us about “the Brazilian way”: a culture built around relationships.
José’s drawing a series of very entertaining comparisons between the design of iconic London buildings including our own London City Hall, and suggesting they’ve been - shall we say *strongly influenced*? by Brazilian inventiveness, in both formal and informal construction.
José’s work is to support this Brazilian inventiveness and creativity with solid and dependable management structures and skills: and to generate business. @sebrae want to be a beacon.
Our next speaker, Jorge Fernandes Carneiro, manages the Culture brief in the State of Pernambuco, where he’s responsible for a variety of initiatives in “Creative Tourism”. Cue more furtive reaching for passports among the UK audience as we admire José’s images of cultural life.
Creative tourism, José says, makes you “the protagonist of your own journey”. They have initiatives around special areas, themed projects such as one focusing on the Afro-Brazilian and African cultural forms flourishing in Pernambuco. Honestly, I can’t keep up ...
... with Jorge [not José. My apologies. Jorge] who’s exhorting us to visit and learn to cook a local dish - play a local instrument - participate in a Maracatú street performance or go to a festival. Take a look at their stunning work: Rede Nacional de Turismo Criativo - RECRIA
Here’s their Facebook page: pt-br.facebook.com/redenacionalde…
Next up is Kdu dos Anjos, from Belo Horizonte, the capital of the central Brazilian state of Minas Gerais. He’s describing his early days as a rap entrepreneur staging underground (well, under-bridge) rap battles and unlicensed poetry open mics.
He opened a library next door to his dad’s snack bar in Favelinha - although everyone said people in the favelas didn’t read - and surprise surprise! Thousands of people were soon attending rap events there. They started teaching English; and capoeira; ...
... it wasn’t long before a cultural centre was born.
Now Kdu's organisation, La de Favelinha Cultural Centre, supports creative businesses that earn 150 people a living. His project are mainly crowdfunded, but also take a percentage of those businesses' profits to support the sustainability of the overall initiative.
Check them out: @oficinaladafavelinha or donate to them! evoecultural.com/ladafavelinha
We're now picking up a theme that occupied us yesterday: how we measure the value of cultural activity. PPP has been working with Leandro Valiati of @neccult , @battersea_arts, @ContactMcr, @agenciaderedes and @redesdamare supported by AHRC on a year long research project ...
... exploring exactly this question. We're going to devote the next 2 panels to sharing the methodologies, exchanges and some early findings of this project.
Matt Fenton of @ContactMcr has given the audience a quick primer on Contact's culture and is now focusing us on the most important context in which it is currently delivering its work: not so much one of gentrification, but of austerity.
Matt is eloquently marking out some of the social impacts of austerity within the communities of North Manchester, and asks: How do we ensure that our work is never seen or used as a sticking-plaster over some of these deep wounds?
Quoting Contact's founder @JohnMcGrathMB , Matt says we must continue to ask every day, How might we, or the world around us, be changed for the better through our work?
He's determined that the positive impacts we are rightly proud of are seen within a clear view of the wider situation, recognising when people's lives are worsening - and that we're not helping policymakers get off the hook.
Isabella Porto, from @redesdamare, now introduces the context where she works: Rio de Janeiro's largest favela complex, Mare. (Apols for the lack of accents when tweeting from my laptop!)
@redesdamare structures its work on five axes: 1) Arts and Culture, 2) Territorial community development, 3) Rights work on Public Security and Access to Justice; 4) Education; 5) Identity, Memory and Communication. She's showing some enchanting images from their arts programme
... and Isabella wryly reflects it's much easier to attract international artists to visit, perform and teach workshops in Mare than it is to persuade Brazilian artists to work in this stigmatized community.
So, why did Redes da Mare get involved with the Relative Values research project? They wanted to understand their community and to memorialize their research; to understand better the value of the work they're developing across their community.
Now @lizziemorets is telling us about @battersea_arts changing their mission from an artform focus 'inventing the future of theatre' to a focus on harnessing the power of creativity for all kinds of social benefit.
She's namechecking several of the projects @battersea_arts has supported through @Agency_change, from board games to fashion initiatives, all led by local young people: and reflecting on BAC's use of the Scratch methodology to help support innovation in more and more sectors.
@battersea_arts is soon to open a new Scratch Hub supporting creative and social enterprises aligned to its mission - and is also exploring how it can better represent young people's voices in a variety of ways.
@marcusfaustini compliments @Contact and @battersea_arts, who have inspired @agenciaderedes as well as being inspired by the project to set up @Agency_change. It's also a privilege to be working with @redesdamare - "a mother of an organisation". That's definitely a compliment.
Faustini is taking us on a journey - describing his upbringing in Rio's favela communities and his trajectory into the film and creative industries. The first privilege he notes is that, though he was from a peripheral community, he was white.
So it was easier for him to mimic the behaviour of the arts elite. In fact, he says, he just pretended he was a contemporary artist and somehow people believed him.
Faustini insists that his rise within Rio's cultural world has nothing to do with any personal merit. Now, as leader of @agenciaderedes, he's consolidated some of the skills and resources he noticed gave him advantages into a methodology that the project teaches to young people.
The NGO has now worked with over 4,000 young people. It's brought the concept of territory to public policy - working with young people to develop their ability to work from their own territory and to move between territories across the city.
@marcusfaustini is moving on rapidly to talk about the shadow of fascism in Brazilian politics at present and the way @agenciaderedes has chosen to deal with it. It's a time when they are cagey about which political stakeholders they feel they can collaborate with - be funded by.
Independence is expensive. But they've secured funding from the Ford Foundation to mobilise 1,600 young people into a series of political discussions staged in favelas. It's a leadership development programme aiming to develop a future Mayor of Rio from among 13 young candidates.
They're engaging young people in discussion about public security, safety on the streets, sexual harassment, Art is not separate from this world. We're working to protect ourselves against the militia and the middle class, which is afraid of us empowering ourselves.
It's important to give these young people visibility: visibility protects their rights, protects them. So that's what we are working for.
Paul Heritage has wrestled @marcusfaustini off the stage with a promise to screen his video later and handed the baton to @LeandroValiati of @Neccult at @ufrgsnoticias - also, now the Visiting Professor of Cultural Economy at @QMULsed .
Leandro sees his role as an economist as being to provide a sophisticated lens on the way we live, to enable us to make good choices. He's not sure whether he can assess (count) the value of this work; he's more comfortable with the terminology of "recognising" its value.
This is not necessarily about having to have social impact through your creative industries programme. Indeed, @Leandrovaliati notes that many creative industries sectors reproduce and even concentrate social inequalities we see around us.
And we're also not talking about the scale of "industry" that that word might suggest - massive corporations, huge factories. So it's important for the economic researcher to choose the right lens, in order to understand this special sector.
And we needed to cede control of the methodologies of the research and hand over the doing of the research to the arts organisations themselves - which has been a learning process for us.
What we've been aiming for is to produce a tool for the organisations to understand their own relationship with the territory: and for policymakers to understand them better.
After a quick tea break, we'll have a presentation by of the toolkit that was developed for the research - and then invite the panel back for a wider discussion. .
Paul Heritage of PPP introduces the thinking behind Relative Values’ move to give protagonism back to arts organisations and enable them to begin to measure their own value in their territories - rather than being evaluated by others.
Leandro describes how the @neccult and PPP team worked with the arts organisations right from the beginning to develop a toolkit that aims to quantify:
You can see that we’ve structured the thinking around three pillars. Under each, there’s a group of themes or areas, and we’ve selected one or more indicators to look at each of these.
Hope you can read these ...
There are more lists - around 50 indicators - they’ll all soon be published in our final report. Each indicator has one or more questions tied to it.
Importantly, this isn’t an exercise that aims to rank organisations on any kind of scale, or to compare them with each other. It aims to help us build a picture of the organisation’s work and its impacts.
After all the questionnaires were analysed, we’ve been able to generate new metrics for understanding this value: rather than “people through the door” as Eduardo Saron warned against earlier, the degree to which the projects support the development of reflexive individuals;
... and actuate economic potential, for example.
And our aim is to help politicians make better decisions - because economics as a discipline recognises that politicians, like most people, in general tend to make very poor decisions.
Mariana Steffen of @Neccult is cantering through the research methodology the team used. First, a literature review; meeting and studying the organisations; spending time there looking at all the existing data they had that could inform us towards our indicators.
Then, semi-structured interviews with five people selected by the organisations themselves, who could give us an informed perspective on their activity. Still honing the indicators.
Then we used those indicators to develop an in depth questionnaire, which was available online initially, & then on paper: ambitiously, we asked each of the 4 organisations to get 100 questionnaires completed, with randomly-selected participants & in some cases, audience members.
The analysis is ongoing, but Leandro’s just presented the early results on three of our indicators.
André feels that the 4 partner arts organisations have 4 important aspects in common, which we see as pointers to the future: 1) they have overcome the debate about social impact; they’re no longer hung up on it.
2) they apply their creative methodologies in all sorts of sectors and with all sorts of partners, through collaboration. 3) they work in networks and they require all of their networks to be open to their participants.
and 4), they have a particular focus on the territorial impact of their work.
Back to the arts organisations. Matt Fenton of @ContactMcr hopes that the project will enable them to stand their depth of work with (for example) 13 Future Fires participants over a decade, built on love and long term commitment ...
... alongside a neighbour arts organisation that gets tens, hundreds of thousands of young people through the door every year. But @contact feels the impact of our work is much greater, because those 13 young people are founding arts organisations of their own.
Reflections from @lizziemorets on the difficulty of getting time poor, cash poor participants to fill in long, detailed forms. And people who’re required to fill in a lot of forms, all the time. It took a lot of pizza to get to 100.
And from Faustini on the hope that this project might begin to redefine the indicators used by economists - and have an impact on that field as well as on the arts.
Andy Pratt of City University asks whether the project could usefully widen its terminology from indicators focused on outputs, to capacities? The types of human capacity that these projects develop in their participants?
And @merisesher chips in with an observation that what she’s hearing is about the development of inspirational leadership by these arts NGOs.
And José Carlos Aronchi brings us back to necessity and opportunity and the way they govern the mechanics of inequality.
It’s been a whirlwind afternoon and these conversations will certainly be continuing offline upstairs. @MJDowle’s closing reflections are about the model of state provision of cultural and creative activity coming to an end; and the urgent need to equip individuals with tools ...
... that will enable them to develop their own #creativeeconomy work. Martin thanks all the partners, @brBritish, @QMUL, PPP and @NetworkCentre and all the staff and translators who’ve supported the event - please continue the discussions live and online. Bye-bye for now!
#CreativeEconomyNetworks: Research, Policy and Exchange. Queen Mary, University of London, 1st May 2018.
