Dear Darren / Sir Nicholas,

Arts Council England (ACE) has tried everything it can think of to improve diversity. The effort has been immense (this should be acknowledged) but the results, in your own words, have been ‘disappointing’. Your recent calls for the Arts Council to do better on racial inequality going forward are welcome. It’s in all our interests that this time we succeed. Ongoing failure hurts us all. It is with this in mind that I write to you.

No doubt you have both been overwhelmed with advice on the best way to improve diversity in our sector. But I am compelled as someone who has worked on issues of power, race and identity for 25 years, and as founder of a Sector Support Organisation (MeWe360) which represents one of the largest BAME networks of creative entrepreneurs in the UK, to add my voice to the mix. Thank you in advance for taking the time to read this.

I make the case below for a greater delegation of power through a £12.5m BAME-led investment fund as the quickest and most effective way to change the longstanding racial inequalities in our sector. That is our first ask. This figure is only 3% of ACE’s £409m spend on National Portfolio Organisations (NPOs). To put this in context, if I suggested investing in proportion to the size of the BAME population, the figure would be £57.6m (or 14% of ACE’s NPO spend). The size of the ask means that creating a BAME-led fund can be delivered within ACE’s existing diversity and innovation budgets.

Once this investment fund delivers success, we need to increase the spend to reflect the need. The second ask is that upon tangible success – which we think can be delivered within 3 years – the sum of £12.5m be doubled to £25m. That would still leave it far short of the proportional £57.6m but would provide compelling momentum towards solving an issue that has proven persistently stubborn for far too long.

Racial equality in the arts should not just be an aspirational hope. It needs to be a practical ambition, underpinned by deep understanding of the issues and by tangible action. We propose a solution which is within your power to implement, delivers far better than current strategies and has the potential for lasting and powerful impact. My call is for ACE to take up its responsibility and use what influence it has to redistribute power and resources to those who have, for so very long, been marginalised and silenced.

Why a Black-Led Investment Fund Will Deliver a Fundamentally Different Outcome

In short because ‘autonomy’ delivers better and is more important than access or money.

The sad truth is that we are wasting our spend on diversity. We use that money on setting or meeting quotas by “mainstream” institutions on the diversity of their audiences; or by investing in large BAME cultural institutions; or on various diversity programmes. This approach is not delivering and needs to be replaced by one that will.

A BAME-led investment fund is an idea whose time has come. It works because black leadership can focus the investment on the black enterprises that can make a real difference in changing the landscape. A slate of successful black-led initiatives and enterprises will not only deliver excellence in themselves but also provide role models and case studies of what successful diversity looks like. It will both directly address the race issue and provide a compelling catalyst for change across the whole sector.

In my view, there can be no better manifestation of diversity nor any better driver for progress on inequality than autonomy. A BAME-led Enterprise and Innovation Fund delivers this.

Why We Will Need to Invest More In Time

There is clear evidence (including from the recent culture bailout) that BAME-founded organisations are systematically under-funded because they are pitted against the interests of the major museums, galleries, theatres and opera houses. ACE has not invested at all in proportional funding which would require significantly more cash to BAME NPOs, c. £34.5m.

The average grant of our largest institutions is four times that of 12 of the UK’s best BAME-founded organisations combined. To pick one example (out of many), the ENO grant of £12.38m p.a. would pay for 25 Akram Khan Dance Companies; or 29 Phoenix Dance Companies; or 49 Punch Records; or 56 Ballet Blacks; or 59 Tomorrow’s Warriors; or 63 organisations like MeWe360.

These BAME-founded projects are part of ACE’s National Portfolio and deliver excellence, value for money, drive innovation and create small businesses which will diversify the sector and be the heritage of tomorrow. Yet the annual budget of the largest institutions could fund 12 such BAME NPOs (collectively) nine times over.

If at every 4-year spending review, ACE were to increase funding to all these BAME organisations by four per cent (more than twice the current rate of inflation) it would take 140 years for them, collectively, to match the grants of our larger institutions. We would not accept this rate of change to fix the inequalities in the criminal justice or education systems. It is equally intolerable for us to wait so long to root out structural inequalities in the arts.

We never ask any of the major arts institutions to deliver excellence on a shoestring. Yet, in terms of relative funding, we ask BAME-founded organisations to deliver excellence whilst surviving on crumbs. The rate of attrition on BAME leaders and their organisations is high, and, as a result, diversity and equality becomes a mirage. This is what David Olusoga meant when he said:

‘’… diversity is cherished, only so long as it doesn’t upset or challenge the values and beliefs of those with power. So in the end it comes down to this … does our industry [sector] have the will to genuinely share power with those who have, for so very long, been marginalized and silenced’’.

Summary

I have tried to outline two main issues that have held back progress on the issue of race. The first is the ineffectiveness of current approaches. And the second is the scale of racial inequalities in arts funding, i.e. that on our current trajectory we are several generations away from a fair solution.

And I have outlined two solutions. The first is to delegate investment to a separate BAME-led fund as the means by which to enable the autonomy that will deliver a fundamentally better outcome. Such a fund would demonstrate a real commitment to delivering on the powerful statements made by you both, e.g. in the introduction to ACE’s Diversity Review by Sir Nicholas, and the Black Lives Matter blog by Darren. And the second is to double the budget allocation once this approach is shown to work. It would still leave the sector short of racial equality but would make a very substantial contribution towards the outcome we need to realise.

These solutions are practical and within your power to implement. They will deliver far better than current strategies, will enable enduring change and will deliver lasting and powerful impact. We should act now.

Yours Sincerely,

Kevin Osborne

Founder & CEO

MeWe360

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The renewed energy and publicity across the world being poured into the fight for racial equality is colliding with the Covid crisis, taking us to a crossroads for arts funding in the UK.

All funders – especially Arts Council England (ACE), given its responsibility to help distribute the £1.57 billion of emergency funding to the arts and creative sector – have to reconcile their renewed commitment to racial justice and the need to support what is disproportionately a white arts, cultural and creative industry.

Covid and Black Lives Matter may just be moments of crisis and the bailout could be used to simply get us back to life as normal. Or, together with the looming financial crisis and climate change, this may all be a tipping point into something new, and the bailout used to shape the future we want to see for our sector, our country and perhaps the world.

The funding fault lines

As a black leader with 30 years’ experience in the arts and creative industries, I have hopes and fears for the bailout as a moment of change.

There is little research on diversity funding policy specifically relating to race; we don’t capture this history sufficiently well. There are valuable case studies, but the opportunities to learn from these have too often been missed. As a result, diversity arts funding policy and practice has made little progress. Funders, including ACE, still have a systemic bias against the funding of Black Asian and Minority Ethnic (BAME) organisations. For the avoidance of any confusion let me give an example.

In 1996, I founded Tribal Tree (Tribal), a not-for-profit programme for music artists. Located in Camden, opposite the Roundhouse, Tribal targeted disadvantaged young people, mainly from BAME communities. The programme, arguably the most successful of its type, helped launch artists like Plan B, Amir Amor, Richard Rawson and Anita Blay. Others became community leaders emulating the work of Tribal, and one became a therapist with a special interest in youth violence.

3 years after launch, Tribal won the PRS Foundation’s Outstanding Contribution to New Music Award. Four years later Tribal closed. Tribal’s funding slowly dried up as funding was redirected to the £27m development of the Roundhouse, which was supported with private investment from Sir Torquil Norman and grants from the Arts Council amongst others.

The story highlights the fault lines in our funding system. No one set out to close Tribal; I doubt Sir Torquil knew Tribal existed, and there was no question that ACE valued Tribal’s work. So, what went wrong?

Two for the price of one

The reason a potentially flagship BAME organisation got trampled under the wheels of a major heritage project was due to the systemic bias of funders, who, with good intentions, prioritise preservation of heritage (often associated with excellence), value for money (i.e. match funding and scale) and diversity, in that order. When resources are limited, genuinely delivering on all three priorities becomes difficult. Embedding the delivery of diversity targets into ‘heritage organisations’ like the opera houses and the major museums and galleries, allows funders to get ‘two priorities for the price of one’. There is then less impetus to fund BAME-led and BAME-focused initiatives.

I worked with the Roundhouse in developing its community programme. It was a good project, which served the whole community, but it was not BAME-founded nor BAME-led. In my view BAME ‘foundership’ and leadership matters. For ACE and others to fund the Roundhouse at the expense of a grassroots BAME-led project, which was exceeding all performance targets, was at odds with best diversity practice. However, when a large project came along with matched funding, great connections and a strong heritage angle, the smaller organisation, with its grass roots character, had no chance – no matter what its track record.

Inconsistent

It’s worth saying, that the ‘value for money’ argument is not consistently applied. For example, the Royal Opera House and English National Opera (ENO) deliver a more similar product than Tribal and the Roundhouse, yet both continue to receive a lot of public funding, despite all the debates about value for money. Why? Because the arts funding system in the UK values heritage even more than value for money.

Changing this will not be easy, but equally, it is not that difficult either. My guess is that ACE will again bailout the ENO and other large institutions that are arguably surplus to requirements both in terms of their value for money and, in my view, their heritage value. ENO’s grant of £12.38m would pay for 63 organisations like MeWe360, the sector support organisation I run for BAME creative entrepreneurs in the UK. If as a society we value organisations like ENO 63 times more than MeWe, then it is unsurprising that BAME-led organisations which deliver excellence, value for money, drive innovation and create small businesses which will diversify the sector, struggle to survive at moments of crisis.

Waiting for equitable distribution

Undeniably, we are at a moment of crisis and the distribution of the bailout will reflect (in pounds, shillings and pence) how far we’ve come on diversity. So far, ACE’s emergency funding programme has not reached the number of BAME organisations it should have. The equitable distribution of the £1.57 billion bailout of the arts and creative sector could be an opportunity to change things.

Where should we start? ACE needs to create a £12.38m BAME investment fund that will support creative enterprises and entrepreneurs through this crisis and delegate management of this fund to those with a track record of accessing and supporting BAME talent. The £12.38m figure for the BAME fund is the same as the annual ACE grant to ENO. It is not about a tradeoff between ENO and a BAME fund – this would be a distraction. The number focuses attention on what we genuinely value; and the extent to which black lives really matter to decision makers in our sector.

Our government delegates arts funding to the Arts Council, and the Arts Council now needs to delegate down another level again. It has done so before. If managed in the right way, this will be an equitable way to support diverse creative businesses out of the current crisis and stimulate the more inclusive sector we all want to see. If successful, we can create the heritage of tomorrow, owned and valued equally by us all and housed more in cyber space than in crumbling buildings.

Genuine diversity should not just be an aspirational hope. It needs to be a practical ambition, underpinned by tangible action. We know what we need to do. And, if crises are opportunities for change, we now have a once in a generation opportunity to act.

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