If you are well versed in public funding, you don’t need to read the next three paragraphs, setting out the context of Jumped Up’s governance model. Or maybe you do, as it reflects the insider knowledge that “communities” rarely carry, and thereby reminds  us of our privilege of being inside the system.

Jumped Up Theatre became a charity and limited company in 2003 because, at the time, this was essential for arts organisations to apply for public funding. Other formal structures are now available, and some are more straightforward and cheaper to set up. There are financial advantages of being a registered charity, balancing the reporting obligations and processes. The decision-making process, aka the governance, is laid out in our Articles and Memorandums of Association, including the requirement to have a board of trustees leading the organisation.

The Charity Commission defines trustees as ‘the people who lead the charity and decide how it is run’. For Jumped Up, this means a small board of trustees who have a range of skills across different sectors and a mix of local and national viewpoints. They meet at least four times a year to provide the company’s management with ‘check and challenge’ and to agree strategic objectives, with additional support and oversight being provided as needed in-between quarterly meetings. 

Charity trustees cannot be paid for their time working for the charity, although they receive other benefits in their role, such as skill and career development, and fulfilling the desire the ‘put something back’. The time they invest varies in response to the needs of the organisation and the capacity of the individual trustee, who also serve limited terms (a maximum of six years in our case). This structure is a standard charity governance model.

Having a board of trustees addresses more than Jumped Up’s pragmatic need to have a formal structure that is recognised by funders. From our earliest days, trustees have been a source of advice and support, initially bringing years of experience and knowledge to a young, artist-led organisation whose management lacked sector knowledge or contacts. As the company’s experience has grown and Jumped Up has become a place-based organisation, the dynamic of the trustees has also changed. The ‘check and challenge’ of trustees is not just about responsible use of grants or the quality of our work; it is also about how we are serving our locale – Peterborough.

This does not mean that the trustees have to be experts on the city, though four of the five of our current trustees grew up or live here. Informed questioning of objectives and processes should provide some of the challenge we need, however, even the most thoughtful and strategic questioning will be shaped by an individual’s lived experience. i.e. be subjective. How can five people, however committed and thorough, reflect the breadth of lived experience, and needs of the diverse and complex city where we work?

The city of Peterborough has undergone massive growth and change in the past two decades, building on the legacy as a post-war new town. In the 2021 census, 32.2% were under the age of 25, and 28.2% were born outside of the UK (16.3% from mainland Europe), 55% live with one level of deprivation or more. Jumped Up trustees have an average age is 43, 80% are white, and 40% are male. By comparison, research by the Charity Commission in 2017 showed that trustees had an average age of 60, 92% of trustees were white and 66% were male. 

Jumped Up’s representation in governance compares favourably to the national averages for charities. However, just because it’s not as out of touch as national comparators doesn’t mean it can therefore claim to be ‘in touch’. It is important to us to be ‘in touch’. 

It’s not just a moral question of representation and equity, it’s also pragmatic – how can we appeal to local audiences, participants, and artists if we don’t have their needs and aspirations built into our day-to-day processes and longer-term strategies? Being in touch is both a moral imperative and a mode of survival. Audiences, participants, and artists need opportunities to speak to power (our trustees and team), if we want these voices to be truly influential and to contribute to our success.

The barriers to having younger and more diverse representation among trustees are well documented, ranging from the difficulty of not paying those on lower income for their time to having alienating recruitment and management processes. We continue to take steps to address these intrinsic barriers, such as recruiting through young trustees’ networks and actively reaching out to diverse communities, inviting them to events and asking for their feedback. 

Jumped Up is also exploring other ways of bringing wider perspectives to our decision-making processes. This includes being more conscious of the multiple networks we are plugged into and the local intelligence that’s gleaned from conversations within these relationships. This can range from a chat in the street to attending events (arts and community) and talking to new people, with no agenda other than an opportunity to exchange knowledge. 

By valuing these dynamics more, and the time and skill it takes to make them productive, capacity is being built into projects to grow and deepen these relationships, including spreading them across the organisation, so they sit with Jumped Up Theatre and our partners, rather than any individual or single organisation (or gatekeeper).

The pandemic brought the opportunity of developing two networks, a Sounding Board and a Culture Forum, which have benefits for their participants, but also feed our own organisation with energy and insight. The trustees have as much contact with these networks as the events and projects that we produce, thereby encouraging our governance to dig beneath the public face of the organisation and to absorb the context in which we are operating.

Having a Youth Sounding Board has changed our organisation. On one level, it’s about plugging into new energies and different conversations about what’s important and what’s difficult. The young people we co-created with on Fierce Talent and Right Here Right Now are interested in exploring ideas rather than fixing on answers. They are genuinely curious and accommodating to other people’s points of view because they haven’t become fixed in a tribe or a mindset yet. At the very least, this challenges our management to practice an openness and fluidity that years of chasing project grants and commissions can squeeze out of a creative practitioner. At other times, a couple of hours spent with this funny, challenging and insightful group of young people gives the staff team a much-needed boost of energy and joyful optimism.

The Sounding Board is focused on project activities, creative campaigns about young people’s self-expression. This purposeful activity gives the group an output that sits independently of Jumped Up’s organisational structure while also holding a space for conversations about power, representation, and the purpose of the arts, which we otherwise wouldn’t have outside our bubble of peers and commissioned professional artists.

Peterborough Culture Forum was created in April 2020 to support the local arts sector of artists and partner community groups when the first lockdown paralysed what was already a very fragile local infrastructure. It’s a mix of practical activity, such as skill development, and information-sharing, and it has facilitated open conversations about ‘What’s up?’. This also gave us insights into local strengths and weaknesses, drivers and barriers for our creative peers and the community partners we regularly relate to, which are more immediate and specific than an expensive consultation ever could achieve.

These networks are now evolving. Both were founded on Zoom, but their participants now have more distractions and pressures on their time and capacity. In experimenting with models and processes we are considering everything in their development, from frequency (responsiveness seems to be valuable), to location (Zoom for information, in real life for relationship building) to membership (open for Culture Forum, via interviews for the Sounding Board), and how they relate to the board of trustees (formal reporting, informal contact, peer review and reflection).

A consistent consideration, which we also apply to audience and participants when programming shows and planning projects, is: what’s in it for them? Our Sounding Board are paid for attending meetings (though not workshops) and we try to support them with other opportunities, such as commissions and individual mentoring. The Culture Forum now sits within the city’s Culture Strategy and is being given direct access to influence decisions about resources, from funding bids to marketing strategies. 

Giving something back to the networks, as a group and as individuals, is as important as any clever recruitment campaign or generous hosting format because sharing resources, from finance to influence, reflects your respect for their contribution to your decision-making. 

We are also seeking to apply this sense of purposefulness to project monitoring and evaluation. This means as well as capturing all the data and impact evidence required by funders, we also make time for deep listening and critical reflection with artists, participants, and audiences, throughout projects. Experience has shown us that this is where nuggets of understanding can be found that shape our way forward, but it does require resources (people and time) and expertise, which can be hard to come by.

Our next steps came from a Board Away Day, which suggests that they take this development seriously. We plan to recruit representatives from our networks to report directly to our board, reflecting on Jumped Up’s programme, but also on future needs we should be considering. Our vision is to have them as paid expert advisors observing and contributing to board meetings (which is legally permissible). 

These won’t be accountants or solicitors (which we actually struggle to recruit as trustees), but emerging cultural leaders, who might not even seem themselves as that, or as artists. They will, however, bring culturally diverse and younger voices into reviewing our processes and outcomes, and into our decision-making and planning. Ideally this opportunity will also support them to become more vocal about their own needs and opinions – about Jumped Up’s work, and other agendas.