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Susan Ashmore is concerned about the impact of the Olympics on small arts organisations dealing with the socially excluded.

Congratulations to all those involved in the winning London Olympic bid ? a great achievement, of which we should all feel proud. And there is no doubt that, as our kids go ?Olympic Crazy? and the money begins to pour into the coffers of deprived areas of East London, the country will unite behind this great event.

Although I celebrated along with the rest of the UK when the news came through, I couldn?t help but feel a small twinge of ?now what?? as far as the arts are concerned. I am a good East End girl who remembers drinking in the King Edward pub in Stratford and mixing with actors and artists at the old Tom Allen Centre in the London Borough of Newham. The Tom Allen was a thriving local venue that was closed ? amid protests ? in the early 1990s. It was eventually replaced, after several years, by Stratford Circus ? a huge capital project that cost millions to establish and initially failed for a variety of reasons, not least because the local population felt that it was unattractive and unwelcoming to them as residents: kind of like a mini-Millennium Dome. The whole process demonstrated the importance of grassroots input into capital projects if their survival is to be, if not assured, then at least made slightly more likely.

Temple Mills, where the Olympic stadia are to be built, was a wasteland of industrial units and semi-feral rottweilers when I lived in the area. I want to see this place turned into something fantastic ? with excellent transport infrastructure, young people from East London encouraged to participate in sports and the old Lee Valley turned into an Olympic village à la Barcelona! But amid this euphoria, what can possibly emerge for the arts? And particularly, what about us smaller organisations? The ones who are chipping away at the sections of society that time has forgotten with cries of ?Am I going to get through the next Invest to Save funding round?? or ?Will Offender Learning and Skills Unit accept my business case for continued support of the services it has funded for four years?? Will the monopoly be on the larger organisations and capital projects? Will all future grant funding have to have a sporty feel in order to attract the funds?

I hesitate to grumble; there are brilliant people on the winning panel and Jude Kelly is assuring us that arts and culture will play an intrinsic role in the Olympics. Does this mean we will all get a piece of the pie, the smaller non-governmental organisations alongside big capital programmes and projects? I fear not, particularly in light of the findings that the Department for Culture, Media and Sport and Arts Council England (ACE) are currently missing their targets for inclusion: the proportion of socially excluded people participating in the arts has fallen from 10% to 9%. With the fear of increasingly piecemeal funding and public sector talk of competitive tendering, it seems this will only worsen unless the organisations working with the minority groups have significant investment.

In his book ?What good are the arts??, John Carey describes old-fashioned conventions that determine what is and is not art. Guiding judgements about how good a particular work of art is are increasingly hard to sustain. Whereas football has commonly understood rules (and not just FA rules and regulations, but implicit standards), the arts are increasingly bereft of such a framework. For the past two decades, in Blair?s Britain no less than in Thatcher?s, the case has been made on economic grounds: the arts are good, and therefore merit state support, because they provide jobs, attract consumers (more people now go to the theatre than to football matches, it is claimed) and contribute to the wealth of the nation. That the arts have value insofar as they keep accountants happy seems a dismal justification.

The demonstrated benefits of the arts are the therapeutic value of creative-writing programmes, drama workshops and the like in the rehabilitation of offenders and marginalised groups, but such initiatives have low priority in public funding of the arts. What will ACE be focusing on post-2008? Will it be funding the banners that will fly and murals that will mount the new buildings? Are we back at square one?

There is a duality in arts and sports, but I would not necessarily state that that duality is commonly felt. The closest relationships would be between dance and sport: physical theatre perhaps. As an ex-performer in both fields I would say I am quite sporty, but also quite arty. Do we distinguish or do we mould the two together? Would an alien ? newly arrived from Outer Space ? be able to distinguish between that which is sport and that which is art? Both tailor product to attract an audience. Both train hard for best performance (physical as well as mental); both design costumes to engender followings, acceptability and recognition. Both try to generate income and have-top heavy management governing bodies controlling access to funding. These bodies are largely people who were players/performers in the past. Both lobby government; both demonstrate positive benefits to communities when they work with them. So there are dualities, but how, then, is one more heavily funded and sponsored and, I believe, held in higher regard than the other?

The Anne Peaker Centre for Arts in Criminal Justice is the new name for The Unit for the Arts and Offenders. t: 01227 471006; e: ceo@apcentre.org.uk