Arts council hopes NPO funding will extend reach
Even though the money is spread over four years instead of three, and most of the 21 former Major Partner Museums (MPM) received a flat funding settlement for 2018-22 (a cut when inflation is taken into account), this is largely positive news for museums. An additional 36 museum organisations and consortia have achieved NPO status since ACE scrapped the MPM scheme. The range of organisations receiving funding is impressive, with a significant proportion of money (£42.5m a year) being invested outside London.
Nicholas Serota, ACE’s chairman, speaking at an event at which the NPO funding for 2018-22 was unveiled, said that one of the key aims “was to shift the focus of our investment and do more outside of London, not because London deserves any less but because many parts of the country, I would argue, need more”.
Serota added that the national portfolio will reach “across places and communities” that have previously received relatively little funding from the arts council, including Leicester, Torbay, Plymouth, Barking and Dagenham. For example, Leicester City Council, which was not portfolio funded in 2015-18, has received an annual grant of £400,000 for its museums service. Plymouth City Council, which was previously excluded, has been placed in the highest of the three funding bands, and will receive £1.037m annually for its arts, heritage and museums service.
Common goals
Successful applicants had to deliver against one or more of the five goals: excellence; audiences; resilience; leadership; workforce diversity; and children and young people. All NPO organisations are also required to work towards ACE’s Creative Case for Diversity and will be given ratings according to how well they respond to it. As part of the funding agreements that will be drawn up, NPOs will also be asked to demonstrate how they will diversify their boards and the workforce.
Isabel Churcher, a senior manager in ACE’s museums team, says: “Lots of museums already provide great programmes. They work with communities in a very collaborative way. But what we’re asking for is more emphasis on that and a greater depth of diversity.”
Museums will spend their NPO money on a wide range of projects, but common trends include learning programmes, partnership working, community engagement, increasing opportunities for marginalised groups, talent development and digital infrastructure.
The British Motor Museum in Warwickshire, which will receive £880,000 over four years, will use the money for family and schools learning programmes, improvements to access for disabled people, two exhibitions and more digitisation of its collection. Luton Culturewill use the £996,000 funding it has been awarded over four years to expand its Museum Makers programme, a volunteering and community engagement scheme.
Meanwhile, Tyne & Wear Archives & Museums (Twam) has secured three types of ACE funding for 2018-22: NPO (£12.5m); Bridge funding (£2m), which aims to connect the cultural sector with education; and Museum Development (£627,760).
A Twam statement says “NPO funding will enable it to embrace creativity, risk andexperimentation to develop a programme of creative work, inspired by the diversity of its venues, collections and audiences”. It will focus on areas such as diversity; audience development; creating a strategic board and trading company to help develop governance and increase financial resilience; developing its leadership role in the museum sector, particularly regarding work with children and young people; and national partnerships and international working.
Big projects in the pipeline for Twam include the Great Exhibition of the North and hosting the Natural History Museum’s diplodocus skeleton in 2019.
Iain Watson, the director of Twam, says: “We have diverse users right across our local populations. We want to build on that diversity as a strength, and we want people to use that diversity in a spirit of innovation and creativity, so that the experience of engaging with us is a very active one.”
First time lucky
ACE also awarded NPO status to several sector support organisations for the first time: Arts & Heritage (£235,000 a year); Association for Cultural Enterprises (£198,000); Association of Independent Museums (£300,000); Collections Trust (£230,000); Culture24 (£296,000); and Kids in Museums (£160,000).
The Museums Association (MA), which is supported by its 7,800 individual, 600 institutional and 260 corporate members, chose not to apply for NPO funding, preferring to retain its independence.
Although ACE has always invested in sector support organisations, its previous approach was not consistent, and not conducive to longterm planning.
Churcher says: “It was very difficult strategically to be able to provide a holistic view of sector support across all of the disciplines and art forms that we deal with. We thought that if we created a [funding] category that enables us to look across all those disciplines to be able to confirm four years of funding, that means people can plan.”
Tamalie Newbery, the executive director of the Association of Independent Museums (AIM), says being part of the NPO funding stream will enable it to build on the investment it received from ACE’s museum resilience fund.
“Research in 2016 showed museums particularly wanted help with their financial management and leadership, and AIM will address this through a new partnership with the Charity Finance Group and a special-interest group for people with finance responsibility within their museums,” she says.
Inevitably, however, there were some losers in the NPO announcement, and ACE confirmed that 24 institutions successful in the last funding round missed out this time. Among them was the Arnolfini art gallery in Bristol, which received £750,000 a year from 2015-18 but lost its grant because of concerns about its financial situation.
ACE has cut funding from University of Cambridge Museums by 7.5%, Bristol Museums by 15% and University of Oxford Museums by 10%.
Local authority funding
Alistair Brown, the MA’s policy officer, wrote in a blog post: “Spare a thought for those museums that have missed out on funding and will be quietly licking their wounds. They face an environment that has seen a 30% reduction in local authority spending on museums since 2010, and an increasingly tough battle for funding.
“The unfortunate reality is that an increase in spending by Arts Council England, welcome though it is, does not replace what has been lost over the past few years. So this is a good day, but there is still much to fight for.
Firstsite welcomed back to NPO fold following two-year hiatus
Firstsite, a £28m gallery in Colchester that lost its National Portfolio Organisation (NPO) status for 2015-18, has returned to the fold for 2018-22, and will receive £814,527 a year.
In 2015, Arts Council England (ACE) put Firstsite into a special two-year arrangement, withholding parts of its funding while its business and governance models were reviewed. ACE stipulated that the funding would be released only once a series of conditions had been met, including the implementation of a viable business plan, a new chair and refreshed board, and a workable staffing structure to lead the organisation through the transition. The gallery, which opened in 2011, had been struggling to retain visitors, and was criticised as a waste of public money.
Its fortunes have been turned around by director Sally Shaw, who replaced interim director Anthony Roberts in 2016. Shaw says there are several factors behind Firstsite’s successful NPO application. These include its efforts to increase diversity at all levels of the organisation and to ensure that the gallery has a local relevance and “measurable social impact”.
Firstsite has introduced artistic and learning programmes and continues to commission contemporary art for exhibitions. As part of its community engagement, it provides a percentage of its hireable spaces for free.
To address concerns about the financial viability of the venue, its NPO application set out its programme alongside “realistic” and “manageable” budgets and income-generation targets. Firstsite has also been developing several commercial partnerships; Curzon Cinemas, for example, screens films in the gallery’s auditorium. It has appointed We Walk the Line – an initiative that helps vulnerable people find work – to run its cafe.
Shaw says: “Over the next four years, Firstsite will deliver a diverse programme of highquality artistic and cultural activities that will have significant impact on the regeneration of Colchester by drawing more visitors and investment to the town by creating a high level of artistic and learning opportunities that concentrate on community cohesion and aspiration.
“We’ll explore Colchester’s significance as a 2,000-year-old garrison town throughout 2018, the 100th anniversary of the end of the first world war.”
Value of National Portfolio Organisation funding by area
London 162.15 161.97 -0.11
Midlands 61.97 69.28 11.8
North of England 81.66 100.91 23.6