The handout Hunt

Simon Tait investigates whee the arts sector finds itself in relation to business sponsorship and philanthropy, following the government’s Year of Corporate Philanthropy in 2011
The Stage, 12/1/2012

Ian Duncan Smith’s think tank, the Centre of Social Justice, has come up with a “Big Society” idea that the DCMS should be hugging to its breast as a tax break that could have been tailor-made for arts organisations. It isn’t.

The proposal is for a programme in which business employees volunteer to work in registered charities in their spare time, and it could be worth over £1 billion a year for charities in unpaid labour. The CSJ’s chief executive Gavin Poole says we need such strokes of genius to tackle our deep-seated problems, “such as educational failure and welfare dependency”, by “mobilising the third sector” – volunteers.

No mention of the arts in the announcement, but since most subsidised cultural organisations are charities and many operate outside office hours the C-Volunteers, as the scheme would call them, ought to be queuing outside our theatres, galleries, museums and arts centres. They aren’t.

The realno could be that the scheme looks suspiciously like unpaid internships without the advantage of the volunteers’ experience being of any use to their CVs. It betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of how corporate sponsorship works, and another confusion of “sponsorship” and “philanthropy”. The fallacy is that it is the staff members who are the philanthropists, doing the volunteering in their evenings and weekends, while the employers are the business sponsors, getting the tax relief on their enlightened flexibility. It simply has not been thought through. Where it could work would be if the employees were given time in the working day to do their volunteering, which would show the company’s commitment to the arts as well as the volunteer staff member’s, but this is not yet in the proposal.

In December 2010 the culture secretary, Jeremy Hunt, launched a Year of Corporate Philanthropy and its anniversary passed unnoticed. As Colin Tweedy, the now former chief executive of Arts & Business, said in November, “It’s a misnomer because there is no such thing as ‘corporate philanthropy’ – there is philanthropy and there is corporate sponsorship, you cannot conflate the two”.

Arts & Business, a charity, has now moved to new premises and under the wing of Business in the Community, a charity created in 1982 in response to the Brixton and Toxteth riots to encourage urban regeneration through corporate social responsibility among businesses. The Prince of Wales, who is president of both charities, masterminded the move when A&B, with its government grant removed, had been expecting to close completely.

Moving A&B into BITC means the former’s staff being reduced from 100 to 22 and losing its responsibility for training arts organisations in fundraising as well as its £7m a year grant, and instead acting as a broker between the arts and business while retaining its charitable status. “We are going back to our roots, as a campaigning organisation in the business community, and the Prince of Wales will take a high profile in that campaign,” Tweedy said.

Part of the agreement is that Tweedy stands down as chief executive and becomes a vice-president with more of an ambassadorial role, to persuade businesses that investing in the arts is good for them.

He will also have to persuade them not to be put off by the protests by cultural workers at BP’s new portfolio of arts sponsorship that commits £10m to four national arts institutions, as the Arts Council encourages arts organisations to be pragmatic about accepting corporate money. Meanwhile, the government continues playing its long game, pursuing philanthropy as the next big thing in cultural funding.

The culture secretary would like to encourage more ordinary individuals to give money to the arts, but although the Art Fund recently announced a 15% increase in membership – helping them to help public galleries and museums to acquire art – the auguries are not good or arts philanthropy at the moment.

Recent figures from the Charities Aid Foundation show that average donations from the ordinary public were down last year from £12 to £11, having already gone down in the previous three years by 13%. The Art Fund upsurge is due, says its director Stephen Deuchar, to a new National Art Pass that gives members more free admissions and discounts than before, not necessarily that more people have been seized by an attack of cultural generosity.

Tax beaks are seen by A&B to be the way forward, a message Colin Tweedy believes the Chancellor, George Osborne, got loud and clear in his four years as a member of A&B’s board before the 2010 general election. “Unfortunately the government no longer listens to us, but we think they are right to be looking at this as more of an alternative than philanthropy in the shorter term,” Tweedy said. “It needs to be thought through properly, though, because there will be no increase in arts subsidy for at least five years.”

The influence of Arts & Business on its new foster parent, Business in the Community, is already becoming apparent, too. BITC has a prestigious annual corporate responsibility Awards for Excellence event attended by 3,000 business people. This year’s will have a new category: the BITC Arts & Business Award, for companies that have developed sustained partnerships with cultural organisations that demonstrate significant benefit and engagement with local communities and its own employees. “We think this is where the future of arts funding and of Arts & Business lies,” Tweedy said.