Consorting with success

Bedford Creative Arts is a small and often struggling arts organisation. We do a considerable amount of work on contract to both the Borough and Central Bedfordshire councils. Like many arts organisations, our success rate with trusts and foundations has dropped in the current financial climate. Even if we only aspire to maintain existing income levels we urgently need a new approach.
We first came together informally with a group of local charities and not-for-profit organisations in July 2007, and have now established a formal consortium of nine organisations, ConsortiCo. We believe that this new limited company will be better placed to secure and deliver contracts than the member organisations working alone.
We are the only arts organisation in the consortium, and we imagine that as the consortium grows, thematic partnerships will develop, for example around health, social care or positive activities for young people. The key advantage of a cross-sector consortium is that it allows us to tender for larger and more complex contracts.
The challenge has been building a culture of partnership, and making the time to get to know and understand each other’s work. This is still very much work in progress. A key reason to form a consortium is that it creates opportunities for you to secure contracts that otherwise you would not be able to. For us, it has also provided support to build our capacity. We are currently benefiting from financial support for capacity building from The Modernisation Fund. This is available to us solely because we are developing this partnership. We don’t have the luxury of waiting for a tender to come up before building a consortium. This is a call to action, to consort and build partnerships. We can only benefit.