Toby Lowe on the challenges of delivering public programmes: you need to speak two languages, have a person-centred approach and a good dose of reality.
For arts and cultural organisations, delivering public sector contracts can be an opportunity to connect with new people and new sources of income. But arts and culture organisations who want to work in this world need to ensure that they understand these complex policy contexts, and above all, ensure that they can meet the needs of the people that they will work with. Can you do all that and remain true to your creative vision? This is Helix Arts’ experience of wrestling with these issues.
At Helix Arts, we have twenty years of delivering arts programmes as part of public services. We’ve worked in prisons, and other areas of the criminal justice system. We’ve worked in hospitals. We’ve worked to improve the skills of unemployed adults, and develop emotional wellbeing of young people leaving care. We’ve enabled homeless adults and people with dementia to express their needs more effectively to those who care for and support them. And for most of that time, it hasn’t been arts money which has paid for this work, it has been public services themselves.
We deliberately place ourselves at the nexus of the arts and social policy worlds, seeing it as our job to create the space in which artists meet the creative needs of the participants with whom we work, and both fulfil and challenge the objectives and practices of our public and voluntary sector partners.
What does it take to for us to work successfully between these worlds? This is our experience.
For arts and cultural organisations, delivering public sector contracts can be an opportunity to connect with new people and new sources of income. But arts and culture organisations who want to work in this world need to ensure that they understand these complex policy contexts, and above all, ensure that they can meet the needs of the people that they will work with. Can you do all that and remain true to your creative vision? This is Helix Arts’ experience of wrestling with these issues.
At Helix Arts, we have twenty years of delivering arts programmes as part of public services. We’ve worked in prisons, and other areas of the criminal justice system. We’ve worked in hospitals. We’ve worked to improve the skills of unemployed adults, and develop emotional wellbeing of young people leaving care. We’ve enabled homeless adults and people with dementia to express their needs more effectively to those who care for and support them. And for most of that time, it hasn’t been arts money which has paid for this work, it has been public services themselves.
We deliberately place ourselves at the nexus of the arts and social policy worlds, seeing it as our job to create the space in which artists meet the creative needs of the participants with whom we work, and both fulfil and challenge the objectives and practices of our public and voluntary sector partners.
What does it take to for us to work successfully between these worlds? This is our experience.