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?Partnership? is one of those words made irritating by over-use amongst New Labour politicians, writes Michael Bewick.
Partnerships, we are told, are the go-faster solution to all our problems. But in our experience setting up our partnership to run New Greenham Arts, they are more like my own cherished domestic arrangement: they provide deep joy and fulfilment but also occasional irritation and a belief that it is the other one draining the joint account.

Two years ago The Corn Exchange?s strategy came to a skidding halt. We had achieved our objectives (broadly), yet the self-flagellating nature of our profession meant that we needed a new task. If we were to engage more people in the arts we needed to give them the chance to participate and this was the point at which our Grade II listed building would no longer co-operate. There simply wasn't anywhere to make a creative mess and being single suddenly ceased to be fun.

The opportunity to set aside our inadequacy lay at hand with a small but imperfectly formed arts centre on the old Greenham nuclear missile base. The arts centre was established by the visionary Stuart Tagg, Chief Executive of a Trust set up to develop the cold war site into a business park which gives its profits back to the community. He believed that artists would seize the building and make it their own. Some did - most didn?t - and of course those that did rarely showed skill at filling in forms. After all, if artists could manage their own funding applications most of us would be out of a job.

It was love at first sight. The Corn Exchange went with the offer of expertise and a clear need for participatory space; the Greenham Common Trust came with the request for expertise and a higher profile for its investment. The arrangement thereby followed the first rule of relationships - as any reader of Cosmo will tell you ? ?don't go out with someone too much like yourself?. Here was a partnership between two charities but ones with very different foci.

So where was the conflict? ?No one will take you seriously?, Stuart told me, with the offices looking like something out of the 70s. To me the idea of refurbishing offices before studios seemed to verge on the satanic but, having learnt my lesson over a bathroom in the late 80s - delaying which nearly led to separation from my partner - I realised this was the sort of sacrifice you have to make. Needless to say within days of completion funders and trustees were saying how much more professional the organisation was.

Most conflict emerged well below the strategic waterline. This was to be no separate operation but one which used the skills and energies of marketing and technical staff at The Corn Exchange, thereby providing economies of scale and ensuring that the substantial funding from the Greenham Common Trust would go to the art. Here there was misunderstanding about the nature of partnership with ?us and them? taking time to give way to ?us?. Takeovers with their clarity of power and rapid changes in status are so much simpler to explain.

The results of the partnership are clear: increased investment from the Greenham Common Trust, increased activity, and usage up from 1,500 attenders in the first month to 1,500 in one week. We have also begun to develop a mission, which due to the nature of the partnership and funding, allows genuine space for artists to collaborate, experiment, fail, try again and succeed, often engaging with the broader business community represented in the park. This would not have happened without the creative tension between the two Trusts: one founded in the infinitely practical world of property and giving, the other in the rather more diaphanous world of arts and audience development. Together testing each other?s will at every step of the way. Now if that doesn?t sound more like home life than New Labour spin I don't know what does.

Michael Bewick is Director of The Corn Exchange Newbury
e: michaelb@cornexchangenew.co.uk; w: http://www.cornexchangenew.co.uk and
http://www.greenham-common-trust.co.uk