Developing Sustainability in the Arts

We explore collaborative working to establish new sustainable ways of sharing knowledge, ideas and resources, and increase participation in the arts.

Introduction

Furtherfield and Drake Music have come together to create ‘We Share’, a new initiative, building on and developing the combined creative assets, specialisms and strengths of these two organisations and collaborating closely with other groups in the field. In the first phase of this initiative our organisations are testing and piloting new ways of working, with a view to other partners joining us during the second phase.

Objectives

To explore the possible benefits of organisational collaboration in:

• Operations: to share infrastructure (administrative, technical, buildings), knowledge and networks to reduce costs and improve processes.
• Organisational development: share personnel (fund-raising and business development) to identify potential opportunities and areas for joint organisational innovation; to develop the membership of We Share.
• Artistic Programme: to benefit from extended networks of skills & experience, to cross-pollinate communities of practice, to engage more beneficiaries with better work and to stimulate debate, collaboration and extraordinary work.
• Services/ Business Development: To develop services built on the core skills and experience of our organisations. These disseminate We Share values, build skills-base within the organisations and generate income. To identify and create new business, generating earTo identify and develop social enterprises that promote the organisations’ values. ned income to support our core offer. a series of projects in

Pilot 1: Shared Web Infrastructure

The first of these projects has been to develop shared web infrastructure and organisational websites for participatory arts organisations using Free and Open Source Software and processes. The next stage of this project is to develop a business plan and seek investment to broaden the reach of our offer.