DISRUPT: TOOLS FOR SHARING POWER
A resource for artists and organisations working with communities
This toolkit was created by people interested in finding new ways of doing things. Fairer ways of doing things. More just ways.
Given the spirit of this work, it didn’t feel quite right or sensible to attach any kind of copyright restriction to the materials.
So, if you can make use of any part of this book to help your practice, or to teach different ways of doing things, you’re most welcome to it. Use it, remix it, rip it apart and put it back together again. Let us know how you get on.
The only thing we ask is that you respect the wonderful illustrations by Matt Munday and Rae Goddard – these are copyrighted, so aren’t for reusing or adapting.
If you want to use any part of this book for commercial purposes then we humbly suggest you might have missed the point. And ask that you get in touch with us to ask permission.
The DISRUPT co-creators
WHY HAVE WE CREATED THIS TOOLKIT?
There’s no denying that change is coming. Various parts of society are at odds with each other, we’ve had radical governments for over a decade, and we’re in the middle of a culture war.
But change is scary. Because when the world is tough and not in your favour, change threatens to take away what little you have.
We know things aren’t as they should be: we live in an unjust and unequal society. And this is particularly true in the arts sector of Britain. We know that subsidies aren’t distributed equally across the country. We know that not everyone has access to the quality arts that the public purse pays for. And we know that too few people have everyday access to creativity and arts.
The system we have needs to shift so all those things can change. And that’s a lot, especially when there is so little certainty in the rest of society.
Yet the one thing that might help us out of this current quagmire is the empathy, expression and happiness that the arts can bring. There has never been a more important time for us to have a connected, just and creative arts world.
In this toolkit, you’ll find the stories of people who are trying to do just that. People who, just like you, realise that without the impact that progressive arts practice can deliver to our communities and our nation, we are all poorer and sadder.
You will hear of their successes and their failures, of ideas that didn’t quite work and those that were more promising. None of the people who wrote this book think they have the answers, but each chapter is written by someone who had tried to find an answer to a specific question and is hopeful that the lesson they learnt might help someone else. Maybe that’s you. I hope so – we need you more than ever.
Alan Lane
Artistic Director, Slung Low
THE PROBLEM WITH POWER
Power is the intrinsic and often invisible glue that binds the cultural sector together. It cements the way things work by creating boundaries, divides and gatekeepers. It includes a few and excludes the many. And interestingly, it’s something that’s rarely reflected on – particularly in relation to those who sit outside of the boundaries of an organisation.
Arts funding in the UK helps to further stratify this by encouraging hierarchical and non-collaborative structures of leadership, where decisions are made at the top. What organisations and artists make has to be pre-defined and focused on tangible outputs that relate to the funder’s priorities. You need to be able to state what you’re going to do and make, and how you’re going to measure what you’ve done. There is little space for flat structures, reflection, process, messiness and ‘failure’ – things that are important to learning, decolonising, challenging, and most importantly, equity. If you don’t want to work in this way, you might have problems obtaining funding. If you want to create projects that are developed by a community, where the doing is more important than the end product, where you don’t know where you’ll end up, what do you say to a funder?
The authors in this toolkit speak of power in many different ways. Each organisation is structured differently. The structures and processes they use are flexible, community-centred, and responsive. They create permeability and show that the invisible cementing conditions of power can be loosened, chipped away, or in some cases, blown up.
The projects and tools suggested are disruptive because they actively attempt to do something that stifles the constant churn of capitalist productivity we see in the cultural sector. They force you to slow down, to reflect, to share.
The journey of this toolkit has been slow, and we all wanted it to be. It has grown from a festival in 2021 that explored the experimental and equitable ways communities and arts organisations were working together during the COVID-19 pandemic. That project commissioned 32 communities and organisations to collaborate, and culminated in a digital festival. We tested different ways of working and collaborating, some of which worked well, and some did not. Our commissioned projects could platform their work in whatever way they wanted that showed their process.
After the festival, we wished we’d spent more time exploring and documenting everyone’s processes so we could share them with others: how they worked together, what methods they used, what was hard, and what was easy.
This is where this toolkit has come from. We are a collective of six organisations. We’ve developed it together, and most of our authors wrote it with the communities they work with. Each chapter has been written by a different author, or in some cases, co-written. It’s taken about ten months to create.
The case studies and activities chosen range from small interventions into projects to big organisational changes. We know that some of the advice won’t be suitable for every organisation and artist because of scope, context, capacity and resources. But even the smallest intervention can have a big impact in terms of learning and change.
We’ve put this toolkit into the world to challenge how and why things are done and, most importantly, who gets to make these decisions. We don’t want to work in a sector where systems go unquestioned, where everyone does things in the same way without reflecting on why. What would happen if you asked people outside of the organisation to make decisions with you?
Or even better, make decisions for you?
Jo Chard
Creative Partnerships and Programme Manager
Guildhall School of Music & Drama
WHAT THIS TOOLKIT DOES
We hope this toolkit will be useful to artists and organisations by:
Developing an openness to testing new processes and structures, resulting in programming that’s more aligned with community need and is more representative
Supporting a better understanding of the nuances of co-production and community-led decision-making
Encouraging new processes in order to move away from top-down structures
Developing skills and reflection for a more equitable sector
This toolkit aims to support collaborative and non- hierarchical ways of working with communities, with a focus on projects and infrastructure that are developed around community needs.
It has six chapters split into different focuses. Most sections include case studies, activities, tips and advice. They each speak to their own organisational context, community focus, and geography. Our authors come from organisations of varying sizes which integrate communities into their processes and decision-making in different ways and at different levels.
