Mission, Models, Money
The relationship between funders and arts organisations is a crucial one to get right and a key part of the Mission,
Models, Money programme’s focus. Dawn Austwick, Director of the Esmée Fairbairn Foundation and member of the
MMM Action Group, explains her take on the funding question.
Intelligent funding
Dawn Austwick
Esmée Fairbairn Foundation
thought it was a bit risky to start writing about
I intelligent funding without at least attempting to
define what the term might mean. So, my first port
of call, being prosaic rather than imaginative, was the
dictionary. Perhaps not surprisingly I discovered it
wasn’t a bad place to start at all: for funding to be
‘intelligent’ it seems it should be clever, perceptive,
knowledgeable or informed. We need to use our
brains and know our stuff! But I think the dictionary
short-changes us on one important issue: for funding
to be intelligent, it has to have a point of view. Or, if I
were being really grand, I would say it has to be
informed by a set of beliefs around purpose and place
– purpose in terms of what art is for, and place in
terms of what the right role for the funder is. And it is
here, of course, that the trouble really begins….
Purpose
There has been a real merry-go-round about whether
you take an instrumental or an intrinsic view of the
arts – with much heartache around the capture of the
funding agenda by the instrumentalists, amid agonised
cries that art for art’s sake is being lost to an approach
rich with mechanistic acronyms and number
crunching. In truth, neither argument is quite on the
mark; the instrumental argument is doomed to failure
because it is always arguing on someone else’s terms,
The principal theme of the Mission, Models,
Money (MMM) programme is that the
traditional not-for-profit arts and cultural
sector is experiencing a period of dis-
equilibrium, has over-expanded and is
undercapitalized. Much of the MMM
programme to date has focused on developing
new approaches and new solutions to these
challenges from the perspective of arts and
cultural organisations. The programme’s
attention is now turning to include the role of
public and private funders in responding to this
contemporary reality. In a programme strand
entitled ‘Intelligent Funding’, a new Provocation
Paper by John Knell and a series of gatherings
with the four principal funding communities –
public sector funders, endowed foundations,
the corporate sector and high net worth
individuals – we will begin to unpack some of
the funding issues that might hinder the
development of a thriving arts and cultural
sector in the current changing environment,
and start to develop some concrete suggestions
as to what should be done to encourage public
and private funders to fund intelligently within
this new and developing context.
w: www.missionmodelsmoney.org.uk
10 ArtsProfessional 15 January 2007
whilst art for art’s sake seems to forget that art
without people may exist, but it has no meaning, no
interpretation and no use.
We have to see culture not just as the rich man’s
plaything, on the one hand, or as a tool for social
cohesion, on the other. Actually art, culture –
whatever word we choose – is as much a part of the
human condition as the need for food, drink and
shelter. History shows us this, and I think 21st century
Britain also shows us just as much.
Culture is consumed (and I use the word carefully)
nowadays in the same way that other goods are: do I
spend the afternoon at the market or in the gallery,
shall we meet up for dinner or go to the theatre?
‘Making’ art is not so very different either: shall I do a
cookery course or a painting course, do I join the
youth theatre or the football team? I realise this
wasn’t Mozart’s approach, but most people don’t
privilege art as something better or different; they
take it into their lives and make it their own.
This normalisation of arts activity has profound
implications for funders as they consider their place in
the food chain: if it’s a basic need, can’t it look after
itself? Won’t the market sort things out? Certainly the
market will sort quite a lot out, and to find out where
the market won’t work, it’s worth speculating about
what the UK would look like without funders. We’ll all
have a different view, of course; for what it’s worth,
here’s my tuppence ha’penny.
There would be less production: whether what
was left would be of a lower quality is a moot point.
Market pricing would mean that fewer people would
enjoy cultural activity – no more free admissions to
national museums, or Travelex seasons at the National
Theatre. Our cultural roots might be forgotten and we
would live in a world with fewer connections to the
past; the classical artforms would suffer greatly. Many
of our institutions would falter. Artists would
probably carry on creating but would struggle more.
Herein lie some clues for the intelligent funder:
the market lives for today without much of an eye to
tomorrow and not even a glance over its shoulder at
yesterday. Intervention should complement what the
market or human endeavour will do.
Big picture
Intelligent funding has to focus on the ecology of the
cultural sector. We need to go to the places that
others can’t to ensure that the overall landscape
inspires everyone to participate in culture, to make
product available where there may be market failure,
and to protect our cultural histories and organisations
from decay. So, in my brave new world of intelligent
funding, I would want to use fewer metrics for
decision-making because on the whole they answer
the wrong questions (on issues of competence, these
can be a card to play, but they shouldn’t be the
winning hand).
I would want more focus on genuine engagement
with young people so that as generations grow up
audiences, markets, customers are queuing at the doors
Photo: Trinity Laban
of the theatres and the art galleries, just as they now
do to get on the terraces. How fantastic that the RSC
wants to take the teaching of Shakespeare out of the
traditional classroom and into performance. My own
childhood was transformed by seeing Peter Brook’s
production of ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’ where I
was confronted by worlds other than my own, a lesson
as profound about life as it was about the theatre.
I’d want longer-term sustainable engagement with
key institutions that carry history, memory, knowledge
and resource for the sector as a whole. But I’d also
want them challenged (and funded) to be leaders in
their sectors, working dynamically with the innovators
and the upstarts! It would need to be a proactive
relationship, developed over time, and enriched
through trust and mutual respect. This would take us
into the realms of financial management, leadership,
and direction. It would require us to look at the overall
medium-term financial health of an organisation. Do
we really want organisations kept in penury with
annual handouts on the revenue front, while we
resolutely declare that weak balance sheets are a good
thing because they demonstrate need? I think we
might be chasing the wrong target here!
Wouldn’t it also require of us that we ask the
tough questions about succession planning and why
the board doesn’t hold the chief executive to account,
because we need vibrant, strong, and well-run cultural
organisations. But alternatively, where our relationship
is more transient – for example, with project funding
– maybe we ought to get out of the grantees’ hair, and
simply ask whether what was aspired to was achieved.
As funders we have to recognise what it is legitimate
for our funding to demand.
This would also apply to developing policy and to
strategic thinking. Of course, we funders are
immensely privileged to be able to look across a
panorama and to see the big picture, but practitioners
are also quite capable of vision and strategy. We
should not confuse funding with wisdom and insight.
They may coincide, but they aren’t always bedfellows.
Inclusion
So what will make us intelligent funders? Listening,
balancing, judging, looking at the whole ecology and
not just our little bit of it. Perhaps most of all, some
humility – recognising that no conversation about
funding (intelligent or otherwise) is complete without
those who are funded being in the room and making
some of the running. I
Dawn Austwick is Director of the Esmée
Fairbairn Foundation and member of the MMM
Action Group.
w: www.esmeefairbairn.org.uk
editors@artsprofessional.co.uk

Sara Robinson looks at funding issues from an arts education point of view.
A process of engagement
unding policy has increasingly called for access
F and education to form a key part of the subsidised
arts sector’s creative activity. Ironically, this has
resulted in a flourishing and varied body of work that
is carving its own separate path, semi-detached from
many of the larger arts organisations. Education
departments have evolved more through individual
will and good intention than corporate design, driven
by funders and charitable imperatives rather than by
mission. There are many organisations who want to
see a convergence of art, learning and engagement at
the heart of what they do. In the past decade we've
seen a shift in language, from ‘education’ to broader
terms such as ‘learning’, ‘participation’, ‘creative
development’, ‘engage’, ‘explore’ and ‘discover’. Heads
of these departments are becoming Directors with a
place at the senior management table and more core
resources for their work. The organisations which are
currently thriving in terms of the breadth and variety
of their audiences and participants are those who: a)
invest heavily in the participation and learning areas of
their work (SAGE Gateshead, Northampton Theatres
and LIFT being three examples), b) embrace the
blurring of amateur and professional realms, and c)
Leading fundraising professional Eva Woloshyn offers her perspective on the issue of intelligent funding.
For better or for worse
undraisers look for intelligent solutions to the
F funding challenges facing their organisations. For
many, this means filling in the gaps in the revenue
budget with opportunistic funding applications. The
larger, more robust organisations plan ahead for the
role that fundraised income can realistically be
expected to play in the overall business model –
supporting the artistic vision. Smaller organisations
often struggle to invest sufficient resource and know-
how into the task. But most not for profit arts
organisations are a ‘red ink’ business. The standard
funding profile for an arts organisation is a patchwork
of public and private funding sources which, together
with other income, services a financial profile brushing
the edge of bankruptcy.
So it is hard to imagine that the arts could dispense
with public support via grants and private philanthropy.
Left to the market, organisations would need to invest
more heavily in the ‘brand’ and become artistically risk
averse. They would inevitably develop aggressive
competitive tactics within their own sector, which
would militate against a rich and diverse cultural
ecology. For the moment then, for better or for worse,
the business models of most arts organisations need
fundraised income to survive. Intelligent fundraising
builds sustainable partnerships from a diversity of
sources. Ideally the combined characteristics and
strengths of these partnerships create a funding
environment that supports excellence and innovation,
and builds institutional capacity for the future.
What do intelligent funding partners bring to the
mix? Public funding agencies make their best
editors@artsprofessional.co.uk
Mission, Models, Money
provide opportunities for people to be engaged and
to learn right across their entire programme, not just in
those activities branded educational.
Funders could play a pivotal role in this process of
bringing learning, access and engagement to the core
of our missions by removing the demarcation that
drives a wedge between ‘educational’ and ‘artistic’.
This feels uncomfortable because there is a risk
involved; what if all the superb work under the
education banner were lost, swallowed up into the
mainstream or forgotten altogether? But if arts
education was redefined for the 21st Century as the
process by which people engage with art and the art
engages with people then the new language of
‘engagement’ would become the funders’ benchmark.
Let’s imagine how this might work. If, as Dawn
Austwick proposes, funders and arts organisations
were able to develop proactive, sustainable
relationships based on trust and mutual respect, then
a culture of visionary risk-taking which sought to
engage new and different people and art, might
become more acceptable. Funders would invest in a
body of work – an annual programme, a festival, a
season, or a project – rather than the education
contribution when they offer enough cash to leverage
support from other sources, and they invest both
money and skills in a stabilising process. However, to
benefit from major public investment, an organisation
has to be sufficiently robust in its governance and
resources to be able to manage organisational change
and high levels of public accountability. Some of the
most impressive examples of business partnership
involve a combination of cash and expertise – in press
and marketing, for example, or in-kind support.
Good partnerships involve mutual respect and a
commitment to a sustained relationship. The most
effective individual philanthropists are those
passionate, generous individuals who make relatively
uncomplicated demands. They take pleasure from
participating in success and in helping to build a
platform that supports community participation. In the
best examples, mutual trust and loyalty are developed
over the long-term. The most sophisticated charitable
trusts are prepared to bridge the most intractable
funding gaps. They offer a light touch because they
understand the arts environment, recognise good
practice, and are content to act as enablers.
The common ingredient between all funding
partners and arts organisations is the desire to invest in
success, howsoever that may be separately defined.
The question remains, though: what should an arts
organisation be asking of their intelligent funders? First
of all, a healthy cultural sector needs to base
development on sustainable funding streams from
partners willing to invest over a significant period.
Mature relationships create an informed funding
activity or the production alone. It would not be
possible to separate these aspects out because they
would be so bound up with one another. A body of
work would aim to be deep, longitudinal and joined
up – allowing for innovative forms of learning and
engagement to take place across the programme. It
would not be shaped by external agendas, but by the
organisation’s ongoing strategic priorities. Methods of
engagement would need to be researched, tested and
refined so that they underpinned each initiative.
So, for me, intelligent funding begins by banishing
the word education (unless it’s specifically about
schools), and instead, collaborating solely with arts
organisations for whom the methods used to engage
people in making and consuming art is central to their
thinking and core to their missions. Engagement with
people might then become valued as highly as we
value the art and the artist. I
Sara Robinson is a freelance researcher, producer
and consultant. She is co-author of the MMM
provocation paper ‘Mission Unaccomplished -
the place of learning in our national and regional
performing arts organisations’.
e: sara_robinson@btopenworld.com
Photo: Merlin Hendy
market. Arts organisations want to offer themselves to
funders as robust and confident partners. An under-
resourced organisation is vulnerable to exploitation
from both internal and external stakeholders.
Intelligent funders recognise the need to build
investment for the future into the funding package.
Innovative funding invests in skills, people, new
technology and research. Intelligent funders will be
prepared to contribute to a big vision that involves
working with a diversity of partners. It is likely that arts
organisations will progressively need to invest in
strategic partnerships within the sector, across
artforms and with business.
Perhaps the arts, business, individual
philanthropists and the independent and public
sectors have more points of common interest than can
be easily identified from our individual silos. There is
certainly a wealth of intelligent debate about the
future of funding. For better or for worse, it would at
least be revealing for private and public funders to pilot
some new models for collaboration, governance,
innovation and participation. I
Eva Woloshyn is Director of Development and
Corporate Affairs at Trinity Laban.
ArtsProfessional 15 January 2007 11

Theatre Director Phelim McDermott offers his take on intelligent funding.
My perspective
agree with Dawn Austwick when she says that
I intelligent funding should “look to the whole
ecology and not just our little bit of it.“ One of the
things we expect the arts to do is to inhabit the space
of creativity and the creation of new forms, ideas, and
perspectives. This is because progress is not about
staying within what we already know. We have to step
across two or three mistakes to get to a new idea –
like stepping stones to a new riverbank. On the way to
the other side, some of those stepping stones might
be decidedly wobbly. It is a combination of really
staying in the moment and not focusing too much on
the other side which will actually get us across.
However, this awareness should also be present in our
funding creativity.
For me a problem lies with the term ‘intelligent’; it
feels limited. Intelligence is very good at telling us in
retrospect how we got to a new idea and then
sneakily persuading us it was present at the start of
the process and had the idea in the first place – just
like those intelligent advertisers do with their
advertising campaigns stolen from artists. I long for a
situation where the aware funder knew when to keep
intelligence out of the room and when to let it in.
It is not an intelligent idea to create a building,
one hundred feet high, made entirely out of sticky
tape (see image) or to fund artists to do it. It is
intelligent to make sure that the 100-foot building you
12 ArtsProfessional 15 January 2007
Mission, Models, Money
make from sticky tape has been load tested to make
sure the crane doesn’t drop it on someone or that
your budget covers the cost of the event. The
intelligence did not create the idea in the first place –
and watch out for its jealousy!
Using your intelligence is contextual to the stage
of the process. It has a place but should never
dominate the decision equations. Intelligence tends to
look back at what happened and try and extrapolate
the future. Wisdom remembers what happened and
knows if it uses its experience to make a rigid plan
something new will happen that was unpredicted.
Indeed, wisdom knows that if it isn’t being surprised
nothing new will be created.
Although intelligence has never played a
dominant part in my creative process, it has often
sabotaged the process in its search for reassurance. I
have cast a show intelligently and missed the
opportunity to work with some extraordinary actors.
The same could surely be said with funding decisions.
I like what business guru, Tom Peters, says,
“Reward failure, punish mediocre success!” It is not a
‘right to fail’, it’s a necessary part of the process – a
given. I think in relationship to artists as risk takers,
funders can get polarised into playing the sensible role
because the art steals that energy. I really don’t think
that we should be drawn into the argument that the
artistic bit is where the innovation happens and
Photo: Nick Read
intelligence should be around when dealing with the
finances. Let’s not get polarised into the artistic
element hogging all the creativity kudos. The funding
discussion should be as innovative as the artistic
exploration and the artistic work should be as
excitingly honest as good business practice. Each field
should be modelling good creativity practice for the
other, not getting stuck in fixed roles.
What would ‘courageous intelligence’ advise us to
do with our money. Let’s get intelligent about
intelligence and move towards wisdom. ‘Wise funding’
will, of course, look like intelligence after the event
but very often foolhardy beforehand. It will also
understand the difference between knowledge and
knowing. I
Phelim McDermott is an Artistic Director of
Improbable.
w: www.improbable.co.uk
editors@artsprofessional.co.uk