Written evidence submitted by Battersea Arts Centre
Submitted by Liz Moreton, Head of Creativity & Social Change, Battersea Arts Centre
Battersea Arts Centre
Battersea Arts Centre is a public space where people come together to be creative, see shows and explore local heritage. The organisation’s purpose is to inspire people to take creative risks to shape the future. Shows and projects developed at Battersea Arts Centre also travel across the UK and the world. BAC has innovative leadership models that are about enabling others to lead throughout the work of the organisation. Battersea Arts Centre is recognised and celebrated by its local communities, national funders, and by the wider cultural sector as pioneering, with a track record of their approaches being adopted by other arts organisations.
Summary
I am submitting a case study which demonstrates the positive social impact that participation in sport and culture can have. And specifically addresses the question in the inquiry – How can musuems, galleries and other cultural venues boost access and social impact?
Following the case study are some recommendations.
Case Study – The Agency
The Agency is a proven programme which best demonstrates the positive social impact that participating in culture can have on young people and communities and also is an adaptable methodology to help cultural venues boost their own social impact.
What is The Agency?
It is a creative entrepreneurship programme enabling young people, aged 15-25 from underserved areas, to create social change projects based on the needs of their communities. The programme is based on Agência de Redes para Juventude, founded by Marcus Faustini in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, in 2011, and has been running in the UK by Battersea Arts Centre (BAC), Contact and People’s Palace Projects (PPP) since 2013. In September 2018 the national programme will launch across more locations in partnership with cultural organisations across London, Wales and Northern Ireland.
Aim: The aim is for young people from underserved communities to have the self-confidence, networks, skills and creative mind-set that they need to become protagonists in their lives and the world around them – able to make change in their own lives and in the communities in which they live.
The Agency is a year-long programme which uses a creative process to help young people from underserved backgrounds tap in to their own creativity and individuality to develop ideas and social change projects which are born from their lived experience and seek to develop themselves and their community from the inside out.
The Agency starts by asking young people what their ideas are. It recognises that they have a great and often untapped capacity for innovation and experimentation. And that for a neighbourhood or a city to transform itself, it has to give space to young people, irrespective of their background, to be creative, try out their ideas and participate in the task of tackling real-world issues.
The Agency encourages young people to think like artists – to stay curious and identify the opportunities. The programme emphasises how tapping into networks of expertise and opportunity that exist within the neighbourhoods and cities they live in – but which they are often cut off from – is of vital importance if they are to turn their ideas into a reality.
The process encourages the young people to build their ideas through an iterative process, putting them into practice and testing them out at every stage of development, to ensure they have real impact.
Since we started running The Agency, the young people we have worked with include care-leavers, refugees, young mothers, excluded pupils and ex-offenders. They have set up social impact projects based on lived experience and, because of this, they tackle the issues their communities face with innovative and effective means.
Hasan Bakhshi, Director of Creative Economy in Policy & Research at NESTA said "The Agency is one of those few instances where an arts organisation is working with partners to change the world in ways that are not encumbered by traditional definitions of what the ‘arts’ are or do. Inspiring."
Daisy Kateeba, 18 year old Agent from Winstanley Estate, said of her project, Baby Reign, which she developed through The Agency "it has given me the opportunity to socialise and connect with other mums and made me embrace the joys of being a young mum after all of the criticism that I had received from other people around me. I can now use this platform to go off into the world and network with confidence."
The Agency is not a standard training or skills development opportunity. The Agency is a creative approach to developing social entrepreneurs for the future, shaping their own business ideas. The approach of The Agency is to focus on the young people’s desires and puts them in the lead. Each young Agent sets their own path and defines the idea they want to develop through the programme. However, The Agency also requires them to test their ideas against the desires and needs of their own community, to ensure that their ideas are rigorously user-tested. The Agency taps in to their creativity with an iterative approach that understands the value of mistakes, helping to strengthen their idea and its business model with each cycle of development.
The cultural sector’s offer to young people is narrow. It is based on an invitation for young people to participate in the existing activities of the cultural organisation, whether it’s a youth theatre or youth orchestra or similar. If they are not currently interested in the direct work of the cultural organisation then it’s difficult and often undesirable to get involved. This is why cultural organisations struggle with the diversity of the people who work in the industry: because it is a self-perpetuating cycle. The Agency has changed this for the cultural organisations who run it. Because of the Agency BAC’s purpose as an organisation has changed from a solely arts focussed mission “to invent the future of theatre” to a more socially engaged model “to inspire people to take creative risks to shape the future”. There is a wider movement in the cultural sector for organisations to connect more profoundly with communities. The Arts Councils of England, Wales and Northern Ireland are behind this move. However, there is a shortage of tried and tested approaches that enable arts organisations to both play to their creative strengths whilst putting young people in the lead. The Agency is well positioned to be adopted by arts organisations across the UK.
The Agency works with young people who live on local housing estates or in social housing to focus on those that are most in need of support. This also ensures that the business ideas that develop through The Agency are impacting on some of the UK’s most deprived communities. These communities are increasingly invisible in the mainstream economic and
political life of the UK and The Agency seeks to empower young people within these communities to reimagine them with positive projects, businesses and initiatives which connect them with leaders of local government, business and other leading organisations in the third sector
Impact of the Agency
The Agency has a strong evidence base for the programme which has been built up in the UK with the support of Project Oracle and in Brazil in partnership with Stanford University.
The Agency has a Theory of Change and a body of evidence which has been approved by Project Oracle.
Impact on Young people
The evaluation measures 18 outcomes (15 intermediate and 3 long-term) with the overall aim that “young people from underserved communities should have the self-confidence, networks, skills and creative mindset needed to be protagonists in their lives and the world around them.”
We have evidence which measures the impact on young people in the following categories and shows significant change in each area:
1. Networking and building relationships
2. Project management skills
3. Presentation
4. Creative problem solving
5. Agency/self-efficacy
6. Organisational & Community Impact
Impact on cultural organisations and their communities
The Agency is a model which is adapted by cultural organisations to boost access and social impact.
The Agency is a methodology which transforms cultural organisations to increase their social impact. The Agency has profoundly changed all three of the organisations who are already employing it in the UK. It has changed their purpose; their position within their local communities; how they are seen by local people and organisations; what people think they are for; and how they interact with their neighbours. The Agency has built our capacity as arts organisations to activate our local area and agitate for social change at a local and national level.
The cultural organisations involved are now working with rather than just for our communities. Our role has shifted from the provider model (we create theatre and then encourage local people to come and get involved) to a co-creator model where we start by asking local people what they are interested in and how we can help them achieve their ideas.
1. Young people and local communities are more engaged in the activity, decision-making and strategy of arts/cultural institutions
2. Arts organisations are active agents of social change in their local areas
3. Arts organisations expand their network in the local area
4. Arts organisations have an improved understanding of their civic role in their local area
5. Arts organisations have an improved perception of young people and communities
6. Arts organisations have improved ability to use creative methods to engage young people and communities
Links
Arts Professional article on The Agency
Recommendations to the Inquiry
There are brilliant examples of innovative and effective socially engaged arts practice all across the UK – however the sector needs to have better systems for identifying, celebrating and growing best practice as it often sits in isolation.
There is a growing movement of artists and organisations in England who think that the sector needs to urgently grow its collective purpose and practice, beyond a narrow definition of participation which tends to breed more of the same work, towards a model where we co-create in partnership with communities. They understand that “improving access and increasing engagement are no longer enough: communities should be engaged at a deeper level in determining what the arts and creativity mean for them” (Rethinking Relationships, Calouste Gulbenkian, 2017). This is the work that reaches the heart of the Creative Case for Diversity, work we must support and grow if the arts sector is to achieve our ambition of truly enriching the arts for artists, audiences and our wider society.
Yet despite a groundswell of excellent co-created work, the wider sector has failed to establish models and talent pipelines for commissioning, showcasing and distributing work of this nature. The result is that excellent socially engaged arts practice is often isolated and poorly understood. This is bad for artists because it reduces the opportunity for their work to be experienced by a wider audience, bad for arts organisations because best practice is not shared, and bad for the public because great ideas often do not reach beyond a single community.
This is at odds with a sector which is proficient and practiced at developing, commissioning, aggregating and distributing live shows and exhibitions. The sector struggles to understand how it can distribute work which is so deeply rooted in communities. How can you tour work which is co-made and co-authored by a specific community? The problem is that we make the assumption that in order to share this work, we must focus on the product. We need to move beyond this industrial mind-set of product distribution. We must begin to focus on the creative methodology and intellectual property being used to develop this work. So rather than tour the product of socially engaged practice, a step-change is required to up-skill artists and arts leaders in ways that enable them to co-commission, share and tour the creative processes and methodologies which lead to exceptional outcomes and artistic product.
Battersea Arts Centre has recently been awarded Arts Council England Ambition for Excellence funding to develop a national network of artists, cultural organisations and communities, known for commissioning, developing and sharing excellent socially engaged practice.
The network will focus on sector development; training and skills development for artists and organisations; and advocacy. At its heart will be a marketplace of methodologies - to introduce the sector to great artists working in social change work to spread good ideas and to buy, sell, adapt and grow proven methodologies.
Links
How can cultural centre's also be community centre's? Blog
February 2018