About the money
We were approached to join a bid to be part of the Unboxed Festival. It wasn’t called Unboxed at that point – it was Festival UK, but to most of us it was the Festival of Brexit.
The people who approached us were from a large London arts venue. They wanted us to be part of their consortium. They admitted they were uncomfortable with the links to Brexit, but actually just wanted to DO something, and this felt like one of the only avenues possible to get funding.
We considered it.
I mean, we didn’t really. We went through a process that was similar to considering it, but deep down we knew that we wouldn’t do it. In the process we found that the deadline for applications was a month away, making it unfeasible for a small, busy company like ours to do any of the prep we’d normally do, and certainly no direct consultation with young people.
We’d have had to have just made something up on the spot.
We said no. I tweeted at the time how ridiculous the timeframes were. How only very large organisations and/or those who didn’t plan in participatory ways would be able to apply.
And now… it’s failed.
£120 million spent on very little. 240,000 visits out of a ludicrous, grandiose, pompous “stretch” target of … 66 million.
And I feel furious about it.
I feel furious for lots of reasons.
One of them is that at the start of this year I took six months off. But not quite, because Company Three were applying for NPO funding and there was no way I couldn’t be involved in that process.
So I spent three weeks of my sabbatical writing the bid with our brilliant team. Trying to consolidate 9 months of collaborative and detailed planning that had involved almost every single person connected with Company Three. Not just for the NPO, though that was our focus, but for the future. Because that’s what we do – build our plans together, slowly, iteratively and inclusively.
Our application was for £175,000 a year over three years, which is what the Arts Council recommended we apply for. If we get it, that’ll be a total investment in our work of less than half a percent of the budget for Unboxed, over three years.
And that 0.4% of the Unboxed budget felt big to us. Important. A proper sum of money. Worth organising countless workshops with trustees, artists and young people for. Worth hiring a consultant to help us with. Worth losing three weeks of sabbatical for.
0.4% of the total Unboxed budget. Over three years.
It would make us one of the better funded youth theatres in the UK, which says more about the overall state of funding for youth theatres than C3’s relative wealth.
But, you know what? It’s not actually that much.
It would change some things for us, but I can’t help thinking - imagine the impact we could have if it was a million. That’s still less than 1% of Unboxed.
I guarantee you we could spend that money so well, and so purposefully, that it would change lives, places and practice forever.
Why? Because we are rooted in our place. Because we are led by the voices of the people we work with. Because we are rigorous. Because we care. Because we understand practice. Because we are serious about equity. Because we’ve worked really hard to get good at what we do. Because we share everything we learn. Because we demonstrate our impact. Because we have impact.
Because we’re not just making something up for the sake of getting some funding.
In all of those things we are like hundreds, thousands, of community projects across the UK. Hardly any of whom got any of that Unboxed money, because, like us, it was impossible to apply with any integrity, even if we wanted to.
I am so bored of staying in my lane and being grateful for small resources, just because I have made a considered decision that the work is best when it is small and local and long-term.
I am so bored of this problem we have with grandiosity, spectacle, new ideas, of ego and faux heroism.
I am so bored of this fetish for doing something big and new when there are so many small established projects that can achieve the same goals better.
I am so bored of the idea that to get more money and reach you must compromise your values in some way.
And I am so bored of asking for £20k when I know how much extraordinary, life-changing work we could do for two million.
Yes, two million.
Why shouldn’t we ask for two million?
Why shouldn’t we get it?
To be clear, I’m not complaining about the size of our possible NPO funding. I know how tight money is for the Arts Council. I’m not conflating NPO, or any other funding, with Unboxed funding. I know they are different things. But for the life of me I cannot understand why you would set up a whole flashy new organisation, new offices, new systems, new people, to distribute arts money and run a festival when the Arts Council, however flawed, already exists.
In a much (much) better world, the government would have given £120m to an arts council fully and freely living its Let’s Create agenda - and they’d have given it to grassroots organisations to make amazing things happen in communities across the country.
And we’d have smashed it, right? We’d have had an incredible festival making a real impact. And if one or two companies had screwed up, as we all do sometimes, then that would have been one or two percent of the project, rather than the whole damn thing.
Instead we get this fetish for top down, big and bold, paternalistic, capitalist, colonialist, interventions. The idea that one man and his team can come and tell us all what’s going to work, rather than a genuine process of listening and growing from the ground up. With the people who actually know. With the people who, when opportunities to spend money arise, have a bank of interesting useful exciting things ready to be developed - because they’ve been listening and collaborating with local people for years.
It’s not as sexy or bombastic to carefully build threads of connection between people over years of sensitive, small-scale work. But it has impact. Proper, long-term, meaningful impact.
Anyway.
We find out about our NPO in October. Honestly, I think it’s unlikely we’ll get it.
I won’t be bitter if we don’t. I know which way the political wind is blowing, as this article by Charlotte Higgins attests. Company Three is based in the borough with the densest concentration of NPOs in the country (though also one of the highest rates of child poverty, not that any of the politicians using Islington as a cheap byword for middle class privilege ever mention that).
(By the way, this quote from Charlotte’s article felt particularly resonant with what I’ve been writing here:
“…the painful, toiled-over, self-justifying applications that arts organisations have to turn in before they get their bowl of thin gruel, in the form of ebbing funds that they’ve taught themselves never to complain about in case it makes them look like whingeing luvvies.”)
I support the shift of funding to areas which have much less. If we lose out because of that, it’s a good reason. But I refuse to say the words ‘levelling-up’ because levelling up is only true if you are bringing everywhere up to the level of the best supported places, not taking from them. That’s just levelling.
If we don’t get it, then we’ll keep going, finding the small pots as the times get harder and harder, honouring our young people, aware always of the potential we have to do something more impactful and extraordinary, if only we could afford to. If that is the way of the world, so be it. We’re creative. We’ll still make good things happen. But it makes it so much harder to see so much money wasted on something so extravagantly pointless.
2 September 2022
It has been rightly pointed out to me that it’s important not to conflate the overall structural problems of the Unboxed festival with those companies and artists who did decide to apply and have made strong, ethical, generous decisions about their process within it. Some have been able to do that and I in no way include them in my criticism. We all have to work in flawed systems and I make no judgement on those that have made things work within Unboxed. I just wish the overall structure had been set up to do it across the board.
I’ve also added the quote from Charlotte Higgins article and the following two paragraphs to the post above -
Instead we get this fetish for top down, big and bold, paternalistic, capitalist, colonialist, interventions. The idea that one man and his team can come and tell us all what’s going to work, rather than a genuine process of listening and growing from the ground up. With the people who actually know. With the people who, when opportunities to spend money arise, have a bank of interesting useful exciting things ready to be developed - because they’ve been listening and collaborating with local people for years.
It’s not as sexy or bombastic to carefully build threads of connection between people over years of sensitive, small-scale work. But it has impact. Proper, long-term, meaningful impact.