Why get up in the morning?
With the dark nights closing in it gets quite difficult to jump out of bed in the morning. But I woke up today and wanted to take a look at the manifesto website. Having developed the manifesto with the support of organisations and individuals all over England, I was and am heartened to see that since going live at the NALGAO conference on the 7th October it has around 96 members already.
Then last month it was a good time to move roles from setting up Voluntary Arts England in 2004 (a national role) to wanting to probe more deeply into the fabric of our urban communities on social housing estates. To really scrutinise the power of participation as a lever for change.
Therefore I was delighted to be offered a job working for the regeneration directorate of Bolton At Home. Yes it meant relocating from my beloved Newcastle, family, friends and fave pubs, but I’m kind of driven and need to keep interested and fired up about my work!
Bolton At Home (www.boltonathome.org.uk ) is about improving lives at neighbourhood level for both private and social housing tenants. So that means taking care of the physical environment (houses, roads, signage, pedestrian ways, community centres & parks etc) but also the people themselves.
It’s rather special on a few levels having been the first organisation in the North West to receive 3 stars from the Audit Commission for the delivery of its housing and regeneration services. It has about 18, 500 homes within its ‘stock’ with about 7500 of those within my remit (the South of Bolton) with Arts Officers allocated to the North, East and West. B@H has invested £250 million into housing and environment in the last 5 years as part of its capital improvement plan. AND where appropriate it allocates 1% of its capital budget to the arts! “Percent for Art” is well known to some of us in the arts but more special is the idea of having dedicated arts officers for a microcosmic urban area.
So what? Well, the potential to make the case for delineated geographical spend, based upon need firstly. Secondly unleashing the power of the arts to help people be happy, decide how they want their area to look, help them make choices about colour, form, shape, quality and style; help them be able to decide that if they want to BE an artist in any medium then that path is open TO THEM. It means showing the ways in which the arts can tackle isolation, address crime and have an effect on all the other social factors affecting the lives of people today. Help people not working directly in the arts to realise “there’s more to life than bins” and that coming to work is more than just another day when what we can collectively do is inspire ourselves and others, have fun, make changes and vast improvements and become leaders in the field of cultural change. That’s a few pretty good reasons for getting out of bed.
Anyway – onwards with the order of the day.
