I’m running a small creative experiment to welcome in the New Year which involves creating a fictional workplace.
If you’d like to write one new episode set in that world, using existing characters or introducing new ones, then please contact me through the contact form below and I’ll send you some further information about the project. If you’re up for it, I’ll publish it as an episode written by you, without editing or commentary.
Over the last few years, I’ve been supporting The Mighty Creatives’ annual ‘Be Mighty, Be Creatives’ fundraising campaigns. Whether this be through a Rock’n’Roll extravaganza In a Nottingham Church, a 24 hour Bring-Your-Own-Vinyl-A-thon in a Nottingham pub, an exploration of Nottinghamshire by bike, or exploring the physical exertions required to net a basketball from a stationery position in the pouring Lincolnshire rain, the campaigns have been fun and firmly directed to supporting a mighty cause: fighting for the creative voices of children and young people in the East Midlands.
This year is no exception. Called The Mighty (Un)Mute, we’re aiming to raise £5,000 to support the artistic creation for one of ten Globe Sculptures in The World Reimagined art trail across Leicester, one of the most multicultural cities in the UK.
Our Globe has been created by local young people and supporting artists, responding to the theme of Still We Rise. The purpose? To recognise and honour those most impacted by the Transatlantic Trade in Enslaved Africans through the centuries to the present day.
The TMC staff team are going to support the campaign by taking part in the Mighty (UN)Mute, a day-long vow of silence, on the 5th October. We’re going to put ourselves ‘on mute’ to turn up the volume of young people’s voices, especially those who identify as part of the Global Majority… those young people who so often go unheard. We won’t be communicating with anyone throughout the day verbally, electronically or in written form.
Over the last 25 days I’ve contributed 25 blog posts on the topic of shutting up, silence and being silenced. There’s been lot to consider and lots to discuss. And this is my final request to you to support our campaign.
If this isn’t possible (and heaven knows we’re all in tough financial times right now), then anything you can do to share and shout about the campaign would be equally welcome and appreciated.
So… come and encourage me to shut up, once and for all. You know you want to.
Organisations look pretty imposing from the outside: pictures of corporate serenity, coherent matching wall paper and carpet, an organism at one with itself and its surroundings. A well sorted business entity.
However, you’ll soon realise after working with organisations for a while, that this appearance of solidity and uniformity, is in actual fact a mirage and that all your average organisation actually is, is a large piece of cheese: smooth and daunting on the outside, but full of holes in the inside.
An organisations’ holes become apparent when messages get lost, staff don’t return calls, emails get unanswered and letters get returned to sender. Things fall down the cracks in the middle of departments, never to be seen again.
Apparently,, the cheese industry calls holes in cheese “eyes”. This is particularly ironic for those organisations whose infrastructure is so shot to pieces, they resemble slabs of Emmenthaler or Appenzell – the cheeses with the largest holes in them. If one thing a holey organisation doesn’t have, is eyes: or ears too for that matter.
And most times its digestive system doesn’t function properly either, from one end of the organisation to the other. the organisation which resembles a chunky piece of Emmenthaler tends to leak from both ends, often simultaneously. You just have to look at the recent track record of the British Government to see a piece of Swiss Cheese in action and see integrity, intelligence, truth and vision draining away by the day.
Scientists say that the reason Swiss cheese is so holey is not due to hungry mice or over exuberant bacteria but due to the buckets being used when the milk is collected from the Swiss cow being contaminated with hay. Scientists are yet to establish why the UK government is leaking so profusely from all pores and both ends, but chances are it has very little to do with mice, bugs or hay.
Following on from my last ‘CEO Sleepout’ at Notts County FC 2 years ago, I’m repeating the experience on 11 October this year to raise funds for not only Emmanuel House and The Friary, but also now for The Mighty Creatives (TMC) too.
Donating through JustGiving is simple, fast and totally secure. Your details are safe with JustGiving – they’ll never sell them on or send unwanted emails. Once you donate, they’ll send your money directly to the charity. So it’s the most efficient way to donate – saving time and cutting costs for the charity.
The Sleepout involves spending a night out on the football pitch of the club, armed with not much more than a sleeping bag, a pillow and a piece of cardboard. Whilst it doesn’t come close to emulating what homeless people go through, the group I was in 2 years ago raised over £50,000 which went to Emmanuel House and The Friary and so had a direct impact on the services they could provide their service users.
Homelessness has also been an issue that I’ve been particularly exercised by in the last year or so too: this article in the Nottingham Post was a particular eye opening experience for me.
This year, CEO Sleepout – the organisation who run the sleepouts – have agreed to allocate 32% of my fundraising directly to TMC. If you can help the cause, anything you can give would be hugely welcome. And if this isn’t possible for you now, please feel free to spread the word to your family, friends and colleagues too.
I’ve some great thought provoking responses from colleagues about the CEO SleepOut campaign I’m involved in which have got to the heart of the matter.
Such as, why don’t the organisers invite some homeless people along to the evening and enable them to talk directly with participants? And isn’t what homeless people need is to be given respect rather than been seeing as beneficiaries of charity? I’ve raised these questions with the organisers so we’ll see what they say about that.
But more fundamentally, these questions ask some important questions about why we have charities at all, what the relationship is between donors, charitable organisations and beneficiaries, and whether the act of ‘doing good’ or ‘just giving’ actually does more harm than good (in that it just provides short term, superficial Elastoplast solutions to things which require more systematic, substantial solutions to deep rooted social issues): or actually takes more than it gives (in that campaigning takes the focus of the problem away from the root cause of that problem and ‘gives’ the focus to those people who are on the receiving end of the charitable ‘give’.
One obvious answer is that if charities didn’t do what they do, no-one else (e.g. The State) is going to step up to the mark to address the short term pressures that people face here and now, rather than in some distant future when the state might have stepped up. So if a charity’s purpose can only be short term – then that’s because the long term is too distant a proposition for those who need solutions, right here, right now.
But there’s lot to think about here so many thanks for your responses!
But in the meantime, if you can contribute to the campaign, it would be great to hear from you just here:
I’m taking part in ‘CEO SleepOut in Nottingham on 13 October and are looking for sponsors who might be able to contribute to reaching my target of £1,000 which will go to local charities who are working on the front line with homeless people.
So, we get it that a lack of arts infrastructure means no audiences in theatres, library closure and artists consigned to talk to themselves for ever and a day, trapped in the basement of their own imaginations: but what type of arts infrastructure is it that we need?
The ‘just in time’ type exemplified in Wallace and Gromit’s train chase in The Wrong Trousers where Gromit has nano-seconds to lay down the track in front of him?
Or a 50 year plan which is built on the Big Data of today? But which might fall apart after the next election when experts are finally shown the door by No. 10 Downing Street and we’re left with the ‘I know what I like and I like what I know’ approach to building the nation’s cultural railways?
Whatever it turns out to be, we can be pretty sure that doing more of the same isn’t going to address the inequalities which are rife in the arts. Perhaps it’s not so much of needing Gromit to build our infrastructure, but the equivalent of a hyper loop travel system which can connect young people to artists to platforms and venues and audiences directly, immediately and without any of the paraphernalia that chasing a penguin with a colander on your head entails.
There’s been a move afoot in recent years which argues that you don’t need an arts infrastructure and that all arts funding should go directly to front line organisations. It suggests that if the larger theatres and museums, for example, could develop big enough education and outreach departments, these would be enough to increase audiences, develop new work, engage more young people, connect with more schools and improve cultural diversity. All the current ills facing the art world would be solved if you just did away with the infrastructure and handed over the cash to the deliverers.
This is all very well but imagine a scenario in the physical world where you did away with national power, transport and water infrastructure and allowed individual cities or regions to generate their own infrastructures. You’d have at least 17 different types of railway gauge across the country, none of which connected with each other; 53 different highway codes, none of which could be remembered by anyone; and power supplies which favoured the wealthy and cut off anyone who couldn’t afford the tariffs or had access to the countless plug adapters which would proliferate as a result of the dismantling of the national power grid.
There’s a lot that needs improving with the U.K’s arts infrastructure: but systematically destroying it isn’t the solution. It’s like the roads, the railways and the National Grid: you’ll only notice it when it’s gone.
The Nick Owen Banging On Channel 