I don’t hate the Arts Council (article)

I don’t hate the Arts Council (article)

Through almost monthly blogs, articles and talks on social media over the last two years, I have sought to highlight how Arts Council England (ACE) has consistently failed to achieve racial equity in its distribution of funding. This might be considered slightly obsessive, or as a personal attack based on acrimony. But that isn’t the case.

ACE is an organisation which fascinates me. It seems to be continuously on the brink of transformation around inclusivity, but it never quite makes the leap. From the side lines, I’ve been willing it to make the changes necessary for it to continue to be relevant in the 21st century.

But as they say, ‘it’s the hope that kills you’. But it is ‘hope’. And that doesn’t come from animosity but from a place of relationship. I have a strong, but complex bond with ACE.

A strange relationship

Having initially funded my first project Tribal Tree, they then withdrew funding 7 years later despite the project’s obvious successes. The funding was reallocated to support the redevelopment of the Roundhouse, located just across the road from our building.

I was crushed and unsure what my next career move would be. But it was ACE again, a year later, that sponsored my place on the Clore Leadership Programme. That led to my next project MeWe360 that ACE helped launch with an initial investment of £1m. And eight years later came Create Equity, whose early development ACE also funded.

Having been the cause of an existential trauma, ACE was then a key part of my recovery and growth as a social entrepreneur. But it was also part of my growth as an activist. While at Clore, I carried out research on race, power and identity. That research – a personal enquiry – drives my current thinking on structural inequalities and my motivation to do something about it.

ACE has created this beast that hounds them and continues (at least for now) to fund my projects. It’s a strange relationship: with one hand I gratefully receive its support while with the other I write regular critiques on its inability to fund in a racially equitable way.

Why do I seemingly bite the hand that feeds me? Why not just take the money and be quiet?

Silence, power and racism

My silence would be tantamount to being racist; endorsing a system I know to be racially inequitable for my own benefit.

ACE is the largest funder of the arts in the UK by a long way, with more funding than the other major arts funders combined. Its dominant position means that as well as distributing its own budget (c.£943m in21/22) it exerts considerable influence on how other funders distribute their grants as they regularly support organisations in receipt of ACE funding.

ACE’s scale and ‘financial pull’ means that were it to distribute its funding equitably, a likely outcome would be that all arts funding would become more racially equitable. But the major block is that currently ACE is not able to distribute funding in a racially equitable way. After fulfilling its obligation to fund the major museums, galleries and theatres, it has insufficient money left to do so.

90% of ACE funding is allocated to incumbent institutions. Even if the remaining 10% were diverted to BAME-led organisations, ACE would still not achieve racially equitable funding. This is what I call ‘incumbency bias’ and is not necessarily a problem in itself. My challenge is that ACE remains silent on incumbency bias.

Ibram X. Kendi’s work on anti-racism provides a frame on which to position such organisational silence. To be an anti-racist organisation you must act when faced with processes and procedures that deliver inequitable outcomes. According to Kendi, the act of naming systemic inequalities – simply talking about them – is in itself an anti-racist act.

Silence, he says, is the opposite. ACE’s silence makes it complicit in maintaining a racist system. My almost singular focus on ACE over the last two years is not because they are the only holders of silence, but because they are by far the most powerful.

If I were to remain silent (or inactive) in the face of ACE’s inability or refusal to fund equitably, I would also be complicit. Such silence, according to Kendi, would also be a racist act. Uncomfortable as it is, and I sit far from comfortably when writing these articles, there is no hiding place for ACE, or for me, when it comes to taking an anti-racist position.

Champions of a better system

I am a product – at least in part – of ACE’s various funding programmes over the last 25 years. I could reasonably be considered its poster child; one of its too few racial diversity success stories. But to remain silent would be to abandon all the learning and leadership that ACE has enabled over the past 25 years; it would be to waste the money they have invested in me.

Racial inequity cannot be allowed to stand simply through our complicity or silence. It must be challenged. In this sense, we who call for a fair distribution of ACE funds, who point to its policies and practices that prevent it, who suggest possible solutions, should be seen not as ‘haters’ of ACE but as champions of a better funding ecosystem, of which ACE is a major part.

In the upcoming outcomes of its spending review (October 26th), ACE has another chance to reimagine what great arts organisations of the future might look like. And, just as importantly, who will get to build them.

ACE is on the brink of another opportunity to transform itself. My hope springs eternal – that this time it will distribute at least 7% of its NPO funding to racially diverse organisations and publicly commit to racially equitable funding (14.4%) by 2031. And if it genuinely can’t, then it should take responsibility, as the dominant arts funder in the UK, to say so and to cede some of its overwhelming power to others who can.

This article was first published in Arts Professional

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Funding BAME Creativity (article + video)

Funding BAME Creativity (article + video)

Exploring The New Normal

Two weeks ago I produced an online event with MeWe360 ‘Funding BAME Creativity – Exploring The New Normal’. The aim of the event was to ‘dig deep’ into the systemic racial bias in UK arts funding.

Bringing together major funders in the sector, our panelists included Francis Runacres, Executive Director, Enterprise & Innovation, Arts Council England;  Dame Caroline Mason DBE, Chief Executive, Esmée Fairbairn Foundation; and Genevieve Maitland Hudson, Deputy CEO, Social Investment Business.

I was interested to hear their various perspectives on several issues, most importantly on the structures that have kept arts funding racially biased for decades. But in addition, I wanted to understand what they had learned from Covid and the Black Lives Matter movement about the need to fund equitably.

Looking forward, I wanted to understand their thinking on what a new, more equitable funding system could and should like. As people making the funding decisions, I felt it was important to hear their views.

The event was inspired by an Arts Council England funded research paper by myself and James Doeser on the impact of Covid and lockdown measures on BAME entrepreneurs. It highlighted the invisibility and underfunding of BAME entrepreneurs pre-Covid; how during Covid some BAME entrepreneurs experienced increased visibility and, in some cases, increased revenues due to the Black Lives Matter Movement.

As we start to emerge from Covid there is a real desire by BAME entrepreneurs for a new settlement. One in which we remain visible and are funded equitably.

An open, honest and free-flowing discussion

What follows is an open, honest and free-flowing discussion, expertly facilitated by Mohit Bakaya, Controller at Radio 4.

The panel of arts funders were joined by a sub-panel of sector experts who offered their insights from the perspective of grant recipients, BAME creative entrepreneurs, researchers and arts consultants.

Conversations on race are never easy. I was delighted we were able to explore difficult issues without embarrassment or guardedness, though inevitably there were one or two moments of vulnerability. I want to thank all panelists for their honesty and candidness in contributing to an illuminating conversation.

We are keen to keep the conversation going. Let me know what you think of the event and if you’d be interested in being part of a wider follow-up discussion, you can get in touch here.

 

 

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My Motivation (video)

My Motivation (video)

Our most powerful motivations are often rooted in our lived experience.

In this 60 second video, I share personal motivations which have driven my work over my career as founder of Tribal Tree, MeWe360, Skin in the Game and Create Equity.

These projects are about cultivating human potential through personal development, community building and system change.

Malcolm X perhaps sums it up best:

“I for one believe that if you give people a thorough understanding of what confronts them and the basic causes that produce it, they’ll create their own program, and when the people create a program, you get action.”

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The Times: Tribal Tree founder who gave stars chance to shine lines up new act (article)

The Times: Tribal Tree founder who gave stars chance to shine lines up new act (article)

Kevin Osborne helped launch urban music stars such as Plan B. Now the entrepreneur plans a new investment in talent from minority backgrounds.

As a musician, Kevin Osborne played in bands that supported the likes of Prince, Chaka Khan and Curtis Mayfield. As a social entrepreneur, he has helped a new generation of stars to become the headline act.

Tribal Tree, which Osborne set up in 1999, was a programme that helped youngsters with an interest in music who were unemployed, had dropped out of school or had been involved with crime. It was credited with helping to launch urban music stars including Plan B, Rudimental and N-Dubz, as well as Anita Blay, the songwriter. “What excited me was there was this talent on the street just not getting found. It’s funding stuff that others weren’t and developing it,” he said.

Having seen at first-hand the hurdles that people from minority and working-class backgrounds face in pursuing a career in the arts, for his next act Osborne, 51, is securing backers for Create Equity Fund, a new investment vehicle that will focus on investing in black, Asian and minority ethnic entrepreneurs with fledgling creative businesses. He hopes to raise £25 million to “transform the small business funding landscape for thousands of budding entrepreneurs who are currently systematically disadvantaged”.

Arts Council England, the Esmée Fairbairn Foundation and the Paul Hamlyn Foundation have provided seed funding and Osborne is looking for public and private backers to support the venture, while LEK Consulting and KPMG, the professional services firms, are helping to hone the business plan. The fund is due to be launched towards the final quarter of this year. Osborne expects it to make an average investment of between £250,000 and £500,000 that will be put in alongside other funders to support BAME entrepreneurs and creatives with equity capital.

The need for the fund is underlined by Arts Council research that shows only 2.4 per cent of regular funding from the leading arts funders goes to BAME-led organisations, a figure that would be closer to 15 per cent if funding were distributed in proportion to the BAME population. A host of well-meaning grant-funded initiatives have failed to make a dent in the issue and it’s time for a more commercial approach, Osborne argues — one that he hopes will improve the diversity of leadership, creative talent, creative content and audiences in the arts.

“The idea was to create a fund [and] run it commercially so you are not reliant on grants. The idea is you would invest in an up-and-coming Michaela Coel [creator and star of the widely acclaimed BBC and HBO drama I May Destroy You that has a predominantly black British cast] or somebody creating the next Hamilton. It’s commercial content that can gain mass attention. That’s the kind of thing we want to be investing in.”

Osborne grew interested in community work after tiring of his career as a musician and producer. “It was probably the richest I’ve ever been, but wasn’t that satisfying. My aspirations for what it would be like to have a semi-successful [music] career wasn’t how it panned out.”

However, music seemed the obvious way to make a connection with youngsters who needed a hand. “Having grown up in a north London estate in Finsbury Park, I guess [Tribal Tree] was about me having used music as my way out.”

Tribal Tree, which was based in Chalk Farm, north London, was grant-funded and its demise in 2007 made Osborne determined to make his next ventures more commercial.

Funding for the scheme dried up when The Roundhouse, a live venue and studio with similar goals to Tribal Tree, set up over the road. “In a commercial setting, if you’re doing something right, you sell the units and you’re rewarded. With Tribal, you can be knocking it out of the ballpark, but because you’re within that grant-funding system, you can be defunded because something with a bigger power base sets up near you.”

After Tribal Tree’s closure, Osborne completed a master’s degree in sustainable business practices as well as the Clore Leadership Programme, a scheme for aspiring arts, culture and creative sector leaders. Part of the motivation was to build a network. “Unless you have networks in the charity sector, it’s hard to have a voice.” In 2012, he set up MeWe360, a not-for-profit venture that helps “untapped talent”, particularly those of BAME origin, to start creative businesses by providing workspace, mentoring and introductions to potential investors.

“My whole thing was, there’s just this raw talent sitting on the street, none of the record companies are picking it up.

“And we could do that, not just in the music industry but right across the creative industries, in television, film, whatever was there to be picked up to be developed.” MeWe360 is yet to produce its Plan B moment, but Osborne says that a number of projects are “just starting to blow up”, such as the Snapchat-backed Dose of Society, which provides a video platform for young community activists that is notching up millions of views.

“I’m just as proud of people that have shown the resilience [to survive]. We had a guy who had a music production company who was hit by a bereavement and an issue of mental illness. He disappeared for a couple of years to deal with stuff, but he’s back and we support him.

“Being there for the life of the entrepreneur is what I’m all about. If you come from a middle-class background, you have back-up and the fall is far less and the bounce back is faster because you have the resources and network. For the black entrepreneur I’m talking about, the fall was complete.”

Create Equity Fund will focus more squarely on projects that it thinks can be commercially successful so that eventually it can be self-sustaining. “Most grant funding is short-term, project-based funding and the shape of your projects can be determined by the priorities in government at the time.”

He hopes that the fund can succeed in making a dent in underrepresentation where previous projects have failed. “We are not going to move from 2.6 per cent to 14 per cent overnight because we are in a recession and there is a structural funding bias. But it means the talent coming through would be more diverse, the content would be more diverse and the audiences would be more diverse.

“If you have a more diverse creative sector and more diverse companies, it will deliver increased economic benefit. Part of it is about social justice; part of it is, this is just good business.”

‘The funding system has been biased forever, I don’t think anyone denies that now’

Kevin Osborne says that arts institutions had been merely “dabbling” with diversity before the Black Lives Matter movement (James Hurley writes). Now that there is a focus on systemic racism across society, “the great and the good in the arts sector” have “woken up”.

“I was speaking to somebody who runs one of the big arts venues recently. She just said, ‘You know, we got caught with our pants down.’ It is the way to describe it. People had plans, there are always plans afoot, but there has never been the momentum and impetus to make it work.

“The funding system has been biased forever, I don’t think anyone denies that now. They’ve tried everything and they don’t quite know what to do about it.” That has left arts funders “exposed” and “looking for a solution”, one that he hopes his BAME fund will be part of.

Previous efforts to improve the diversity of the arts have floundered partly because they lacked commercial drive, he believes. “[Arts funders] aren’t very commercially minded and there’s almost an ideological backlash against success rather than seeing it as value for money.

“We’ve probably wasted hundreds of millions trying to diversify the arts. The investment model working is very important.”

Backing a more diverse creative industry will mean a richer cultural environment, given the disproportionate amount of funding that goes to traditional areas of the arts that may have small and generally elite audiences, such as classical orchestras.

“There is a whole values thing about what counts as culture. There’s a broad audience for more popular forms of culture and with the tech revolution we are going to be digesting content in different ways. Most of the funders are still trying to get their heads around this.”

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Covid-19 and the Experience of Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic Creative Entrepreneurs (article)

Covid-19 and the Experience of Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic Creative Entrepreneurs (article)

Before the Covid-19 pandemic, many BAME (Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic) creative entrepreneurs existed in an invisible space between the public and private sectors. Both sectors had consistently undervalued what they do. In this space, innovation, creativity and optimism forge a resilience that is necessary for their ability to survive; and in a few cases, thrive. This resilience is partly born of necessity and partly of humanity; the natural drive for security, identity, status and creative expression. Covid-19, like other major crises before, has tested this resilience. For the first time, our report intends to give voice to this group, and capture, in all its complexity, their various experiences.

As a second round of money is being distributed to support the arts and creative industries through the government’s £1.57 billion Culture Recovery Fund, we need to ask ourselves:  what is it that is being recovered? The murder of George Floyd, and the global fight for racial justice which followed, produced arguably the biggest response to racial diversity the sector has ever seen. This has reduced the impact of Covid-19 on BAME creative entrepreneurs. Many of the people we spoke to have had their best year ever, either in terms of business growth, personal recognition or job satisfaction. Their fear is that the heightened interest in diversity will slowly evaporate, and that ‘recovery’ will mean giving up any gains made – a return to business as usual in the invisible gap between the public and private sectors.

Even with the positive impact of the Black Lives Matter movement, inevitably, some of the entrepreneurs have businesses that could not be insulated from Covid-19 and the lockdown measures. However, even amongst this group there is strong acknowledgement of a positive shift in recognition and perception of BAME entrepreneurs within their industries. They had found a voice, and colleagues, as well as some of those in power, were opening their doors to listen.

Our paper – covering 20 case studies – is not claiming to be statistically significant. It does provide different stories of life during Covid-19. Collectively their experiences point to enduring themes, supported by the reality on the ground.  The fact that, on aggregate, the entrepreneurs we interviewed performed better during the pandemic than before means we have made progress, of a sort, and that we should aim to build on any gains made. To do this we should invest in regeneration (i.e. creating new systems, new structures and new leaders), not just recovery of the sector as it was pre-Covid-19. This is not a time for self-preservation by the gatekeepers of our current system; a system which allowed underinvestment over the last 75 years, since the launch of the Arts Council.  It is a time for them to cultivate something new. Entrepreneurial creativity is required, the very qualities our participants have in such abundance. 


This is the start of a conversation. Many of the themes raised need further exploration. The experience over the pandemic, and in the last year, is mixed. But if I were asked to draw a single conclusion, it is that consciousness has been raised, aspirations have been elevated and nobody wants to simply go back to life and business as we knew it pre Covid-19 and pre-George Floyd. None of the people we interviewed want to believe that moving beyond lockdown will mean moving back to being less visible and having less of a voice (a return to their invisible space). Their collective hope is that these various crises will be the catalyst for the regeneration of our sector, to one that is more equitable and as a result more resilient. It is a hope they are willing to fight for.


Thank you to Sue Barnard and the Arts Council for their timely support of this research. Thank you to James Doeser, not only for his work on this but for his guidance. Thanks to those on the MeWe team who helped in pulling this together. But mostly I want to thank the 20 people for the time they took to share their inspirational stories which formed the source material of this report.  

Kevin Osborne

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Reflecting on the impact of MeWe360 (article)

Reflecting on the impact of MeWe360 (article)

MeWe360 (‘MeWe’) is a not-for-profit organisation, set up to develop BAME entrepreneurs – and their enterprises – in the arts and creative industries. It was a project motivated by anguish and hope. Anguish, born of my frustration at the underachievement and under-representation of BAME leaders; and hope that, through MeWe, we can help unlock the untapped potential of our members and help make the arts sector more inclusive. 

My anguish was tempered, and my hope cultivated, by the Clore Leadership Programme. I became a Clore Fellow in 2006. Towards the end of the programme, the idea for MeWe was beginning to take shape. Clore gave me the knowledge and motivation to develop the idea; it also introduced me to networks which helped me to get it off the ground. We launched MeWe in 2012. Now, Clore have asked me to reflect on MeWe and its impact.

Having given up my day job, I had a year to raise the investment to launch MeWe. Exactly 12 months and one week later I received the offers of investment I needed. It was a unique mix of commercial, public and private investors: Ingenious Media, Arts Council and Esmee Fairbairn. In total we secured over two million pounds. Our investors believed in our vision of a new approach for supporting BAME talent in our sector. They also believed that for MeWe to succeed it must have significant investment from the start. Three years after launching Arts Council made MeWe a Sector Support Organisation. This was another pot of secure funding which again gave MeWe the best opportunity to make sustained change. Otherwise, rather than developing and growing, MeWe would have just been scrabbling for grant after grant; a scenario described in my paper, The Black Arts Funding Trap

By all conventional measures, we have done well. Over the past eight years, MeWe has supported over 3,500 creative entrepreneurs through tailored business support, coaching, consultancy, access to space, networks and finance. We have helped our members raise over £2m in commercial and public investments. We have helped organisations like Channel 4 and Deutsche Bank to access BAME entrepreneurial talent and delivered our programme as part of their offer. For Deutsche Bank, our partnership has tripled applications received to their DBACE Awards Programme (which has now been running for 27 years) and significantly increased BAME participation – now at 52% of applicants; this has also converted to winners of the award. We have diversified our income from 90% grant funded to 24%. Having demonstrated sustainable growth, in 2017, we took a loan from the Arts Impact fund to expand our members’ hubs in Soho Square. At our peak (pre-Covid-19), our two buildings provided offices, studios, events space and meeting rooms, creating a ‘home’ for BAME entrepreneurs. 

In satisfaction surveys, 100% of the members who responded rated us as ‘Very good’ or ‘Excellent’.  And within that statistic are inspirational stories of both success and failure.  Like the member whose business failed in his first year with us. He took 18 months out to deal with the emotional fall-out from this. He then came back to MeWe and with our coaching support he now has a new business turning over more than a million pounds a year.  

Or like another member, for whose business we raised £150,000. He then wasn’t able to deliver the project as planned because, with family-member challenges of mental illness and bereavement through cancer, he had to focus on taking care of his children. MeWe stayed in contact throughout and offered support where we could. Having taken time out to re-group, last year he re-launched his events business.

Our aim at MeWe is to be there for the life of our member not the life of a particular business. Because within most journeys of success there will be moments that feel like failure. Our uniqueness is in the depth of our support and our deep understanding of BAME entrepreneurs and their needs.     

I could easily write more about our successes, but as its founder, I view MeWe’s success not only in terms of the standard evaluation data we must produce for award bodies and partners, but also on more intangible measures, including the extent to which we have maintained our commitment to championing the changes we want to see. For any leader pushing for racial equality, ‘walking your talk’ is a tightrope. You are constantly navigating the line between ‘I have a dream’ and ‘the art of the possible’. The ‘possible’ emphasises small steps, the gaining of currency and the building of foundations in the world as it is; we have done this and more. But the ‘dream’ (or the ‘art’) opens the imagination to new ideas that might change the world. And the dreamer in me worries that we have not done enough in this respect. It’s difficult. At every turn you are balancing the power you have as an individual with structural inequalities that exist at every level of society, across all sectors, including the arts and creative industries. What would be achievable without such limitations is the ‘win’ MeWe is ultimately striving for, a win that would benefit the BAME leaders we serve, their communities, our sector and society. 

As we surface from months of lockdown due to Covid 19, a period punctuated by protests about racial inequality, there has been time to think about the last eight years. I question which compromises were necessary and where I might have been braver. This is probably why a glossy presentation of MeWe’s impact would feel somewhat hollow at this point. How do you evaluate the extent to which you have led with bravery and authenticity on the issues you care about, whilst managing the risk to your career, status, financial security, and emotional wellbeing? Any failure comes with shame in our society, but it is especially true when you are a BAME leader in the arts – something I talk about in my 2018 paper, Black Leadership Matters.

This brings me full circle back to Clore, where the mantra during the programme was ‘be yourself’ and ‘trust your instincts’. But in day-to-day leadership there is an almost irresistible pressure to play the game, not to rock the boat, to be pragmatic. In reality, the skill is in playing the game and being brave. 

I have no illusion that racial inequality will be solved in my lifetime, but I want MeWe to move the dial in our sector. That will need my team and me to be braver in having the conversations that need to be had. Perhaps, if nothing else, world events have given me the push I needed to be braver, and at the same time made this more possible. Inevitably, I’ll continue to walk the ‘tightrope’, but now is the time to start doing so with more courage.

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