For me, the end of July usually brings a sense of anticipation for the month to come; a time to relax, reflect, catch up with family and friends, do my annual admin and enjoy thinking about what the next year might bring. This year feels rather different! I am tired, irritable. desperate for a zoom free day, concerned about how to progress my studies and full of half formed thoughts about what the future might hold for the people and work that I love.
We are living through an extended period of rapid change – possibly even the end of a long twentieth century*. The turbulence is unlikely to reduce in the near future but it does feel as if we are at the end of one phase, reactive crisis management, and are moving towards the next phase of experimentation and recovery. Perhaps a shared sense of this shift is prompting thoughts about what next. On Monday Dawn offered some reflections and great questions prompted by a report from the Carnegie UK Trust ‘Building Back for the Better.’ New Philanthropy Capital has also just issued a think piece on How charities can build a better Britain .
These two reports, some recent conversations and Dawn’s post got me thinking.
I strongly believe that the arts and culture can and should play a significant role in building a fairer and healthier society. In this ‘betwixt and between’ time of disruption and uncertainty there is an opportunity of the kind that may not come again in my lifetime** for real and radical change.
My question to myself and to those reading this blog is this: if we want to play our part in building back better:
What do we need to change about ourselves, our beliefs, our practices, our organisations and our models that enables us to be the creators of positive system level change? After all, all we can change is ourselves.
I don’t have answers but, like my great friend, I have some questions.
- I regularly hear that ‘our people are our greatest asset’ but investment is made in the programme and buildings, rarely people. What if we invested in our people, all our people, with the same passion and commitment that we have for our work and buildings?
- What are we willing to change (and lose) to ensure that our organisations truly represent the communities that they serve today?
- What might happen if we invited in and listened to the views of all the people we serve, rather than just the ones ‘like us’ we are comfortable with?
- What might happen if we chose our own measures of success and were willing to be held publicly accountable for them?
- What if we banished the idea of ‘failure’ and focused on learning instead?
- How can we create a new paradigm for charity governance (and sell it)?
- How could we share our creative skills and processes with our communities to enable different conversations and new thinking?
Over this August, I hope to do some thinking, to practice some of the hope that we need and to start making some of the changes that might help me answer some of my own questions.
However you plan to spend August, may you find some moments of peace and joy. See you in September.
Susan
* Historians sometimes speak of the long nineteenth century from the French Revolution (1789) to the outbreak of the Great War (1914). A long twentieth century from 1914 to 2020 might be a useful frame.
** I was born in 1964