Wildewire

Considering how much time 'Not for profit' organisations spend in meetings, its astonishing how bad most of them are at doing them properly!  Its not just the quality of the Chairperson: too often; if Trustees or Committee members read the relevant papers on the way to the meeting, they feel they've done well. They're volunteers after all and those with the best skills and experience to be board members also tend to be the busiest. Its an imposition to expect them to WORK for nothing, the organisation should be grateful they show up at all. I've reported to committees who didn't have the first idea of what they were supposed to be doing and witnessed other treating their workers like low caste servants: one lot sat on what appeared to be a healthy bank balance that turned out to be a grant for work that they had to pay back to the funder a year after the work was supposed to have been completed, because they thought they were showing good management by refus...

Selling out at the box office is preferable to doing it in your creative practice. What one person sees as "Selling Out" is another's  "Survival Tactic" .  Survivors seldom see their actions as betrayal or principle-abandonment and dismiss peer criticism as jealousy and sour grapes.  The competitive world of subsidised arts is akin to pigs at a trough: individual companies and artists try to get their snouts deep enough to feed themselves for the next one to three years at each feeding. The cunning  understand that with proper preparation, they can get to the front of the queue before the feed is even in the trough! Make friends with the 'farmer', become his favourite and, not only will you get the choice feed, you'll continue to avoid the chop. The 'difficult' or stubborn who want to go their own way and won't be yoked, the ones likely to snap and bite rather than stand still and look cute, the ones with unusual or unfashionable m...

The most important rule to maintain your funds  has nothing to do with the quality of your work or organisation, it is NOT to criticise your funders- ESPECIALLY if they're a government agency! At least not publicly. I worked as an advocate and developer for minority ethnic artists in North East England for 5 years and the stories I heard from the artists, groups and organisations I served about their treatment at the hands of the regional branch of Arts Council England were often shocking. The same stories were never repeated in ear-shot of ACE "Relationship Managers" who continue about their business believing that everything in their garden is rosey. Something interesting happens to people who become ACE Relationship Managers: before; they criticise and complain with the rest of us, once in receipt of 'the king's shilling', they suddenly understand and are happy to spout the corporate rhetoric without question. 4 or so years ago ACE issued a questionna...

This debate has surfaced again.  Familiar arguments about "equality" and "discrimination" have been aired. I ran a couple "Lesbian and Gay Clubs" as they were then called, in South East London in the mid 1980s. My door policy- and I often worked the doors myself, was to allow straight people as guests of LGBT patrons - only . It was a rough neighbourhood and my priority was the safety of the patrons inside and near the building. "Safety" means more than JUST not encountering violence... Imagine a young LGBT person who is not "out", and slips away into a LGBT club or bar, where they are seen by straight acquaintances out for a laugh at the queers. That must be a really bad way to be outed. My personal bug-bear are the "Stag" and "Hen" parties who descend on gay bars for a giggle and a bit of a flirt if they get drunk enough- and a bit of a fight if any gay man responds to them. The pissed women who waddle ov...

I wrote my last entry just before things got VERY uncomfortable for me... I'd accepted so-called "Voluntary Redundancy" six months earlier and was running out of cash. My employers had enough cash to pay one of the two workers. I could have claimed the 'last in, first out' rule  and fought to stay, but the other guy was a new dad and had only been in post for about six months and besides; having predicted the organisation would be in that situation as early as October 2009 and having submitted various proposals to avoid it that were politely ignored by the Board of Trustees, I was pissed off and wanted out. It really was strange. One of the Board confided that he hadn't actually believed my prediction would come about "so quickly". I reminded him that it was central to my job to have intelligence about the economic state of the sector the organisation purported to serve. I was confident I could "go it alone". I thought that without the ...