Sarah Champion explains how the Chinese Arts Centre secured its financial future.
Established in 1986, the Chinese Arts Centre is an international development agency supporting contemporary artists of Chinese descent. Specialising in visual arts, we have been expanding into performance in recent years to meet the changing demands of artists around the world.
The Centre originated as a reaction to the mainstream and Black arts movements, as Chinese artists did not feel included in either of these categories. Feeling overlooked the artists organised a weekend festival, which was supported by Manchester City Council and Arts Council England (ACE). Within a year, the Chinese Arts Centre was born, with a large building in Manchesters Chinatown and revenue funding of £200,000 a year. Whilst this was fantastic in many respects, it also nearly killed the organisation. The group who organised the festival wanted to be artists, not administrators; they just wanted their work to be seen. That said, the team was very good at attracting other funding and the money kept them afloat for a number of years. But what was sorely missing was any sense of direction or purpose and so the organisation ambled along until 1996, by which time all the funders had pulled out because of this lack of vision. The only exception to this was ACE, which granted the Centre a six-month funding extension on the proviso that they sat on the selection panel to appoint a new Director. That new Director was me. The term Director might mislead you. I was in charge of an empty building and an Administrator who came in one day a week. I was also told that I had six months either to turn the Centre around or shut it down!
I have always believed that people like to get behind a good, simple idea. So my first job was to look for gaps in the market and sell the idea of how the Centre could address them. Arts Council England, North West gave me ten minutes to speak to their Directors and senior staff where I pitched the following idea to them with passion (some might have called it neurotic desperation!): the Chinese Arts Centre would only work with professional artists supporting and promoting their careers. Our over-riding aim would be to get mainstream arts organisations to programme artists of Chinese descent. We would work as an agency but still commission exhibitions, host residencies and act as an advocate for the sector. Basically, my aim was to shut the Chinese Arts Centre down by giving the artists the skills to be self-sufficient and giving the mainstream the awareness to programme the artists in their own right. The pitch worked. We had our funding extended for another year and, as we started to deliver our promises, we regained our ACE Regularly Funded Organisation status and attracted other funders (they do tend to herd like sheep), thus securing our long-term future.
That was ten years ago and we are now celebrating our 21st anniversary. As an organisation we are still striving to shut ourselves down! I know this sounds bonkers, but it forces us to justify every project we do, making sure that it always benefits the artists we serve. It also keeps us in line financially we have a small staff of experts who have a clear role and associated budgets. Not only does this make them responsible for all areas of their work, it also means if we lose funding we lose a staff member. We were very fortunate to receive Lottery funding for a new building in 2001. It was designed to support our financial siege mentality. Each area of the building operates independently so, for example, if we do not get money for our residency programme, we can physically shut off the residency space from the rest of the Centre without affecting the overall flow and function, and re-open it when the next bit of cash comes along. Every part of our building has to have a use, either in terms of programming or generating hires, and the associated income and expenditure is carefully budgeted. Aside from our core work, unless we can attract independent income for a project, we wont do it.
I am hopeful that our conservative approach to money will serve us well in the dark financial days ahead. With the dramatic reduction in Grants for the Arts, the potential change of government and the lovely Olympics on the horizon, I feel we all need to be able to generate income independent of the public sector and be able to cut our organisational cloth accordingly.
Sarah Champion is Chief Executive Officer of the Chinese Arts Centre.
w: http://www.chineseartscentre.org