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NOTE<\/strong>: This post is to introduce you to the 51st episode of Fran\u00e7ois Matarasso\u2019s and my monthly podcast, \u201cA Culture of Possibility.\u201d It will be available starting 18 April 2025. You can find it and all episodes at Stitcher<\/a>, iTunes<\/a>, and wherever you get your podcasts, along with miaaw.net<\/a>\u2018s other podcasts by Owen Kelly, Sophie Hope, and many guests, focusing on cultural democracy and related topics. You can also listen on Soundcloud<\/a> and find links to accompany the podcasts. <\/em><\/p>\n The second issue of The Miaaw Review<\/em> will be out soon. The first edition included an essay by me and shorter pieces by Owen Kelly and Fran\u00e7ois Matarasso. You have to subscribe to receive it. It\u2019s free, you won\u2019t be spammed, nor will your email be shared with anyone. Just enter your email here<\/a><\/strong>.<\/p>\n Fran\u00e7ois and I have talked quite a bit about cultural funding on previous podcasts<\/strong>. This time we talk to an actual funder! David Cutler is Director of the London-based Baring Foundation<\/a>, and an old friend of Fran\u00e7ois who served as a trustee of the foundation for nearly a decade. As Fran\u00e7ois says in the podcast, Baring is a relatively small independent foundation that punches above its weight, giving about 5 million pounds per year, almost all of it matched by partners. It has programs in three areas: Arts, International Development, and Strengthening Civil Society. <\/p>\n David explained that \u201cthe unifying factor for the foundation is that everything that we do is about human rights, everything is about challenging discrimination and disadvantage. Everything is about how civil society can work to challenge that discrimination and disadvantage.\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n Baring focuses on a theme in each of its program areas. When Fran\u00e7ois was a trustee, it was arts and aging. He asked David to say something about what was achieving during the ten years of that initiative. <\/p>\n \u201cWhat we certainly achieved was giving several hundred grants to many fantastically good arts organizations across an incredibly wide scope of art forms and across all of the UK, international exchange, chiefly through the British Council, and interacting with and engaging every sort of older person. Older people, of course, come in all shapes and sizes. So we were thinking about what it is to be an LGBT older person or an older person with learning disabilities or the challenges of rural isolation. We tried to be as inclusive as possible. We have four national arts councils, and we did a great deal of work with all of them that also leveraged a lot of funding, particularly in England, so that further amplified the number of examples of work.\u201d Some of the arts councils were extremely supportive, although COVID was a major disruption to plans. As David pointed out, funding really does \u201cget hit by big changes, and there\u2019s been a hell of a lot of big changes. So I think people who are working in the arts are very realistic about that level of insecurity and level of of change that\u2019s happening.\u201d<\/p>\n The next focus was arts and mental health<\/strong>. I asked David how they chose that theme.<\/p>\n \u201cWe chose creative opportunities for people with mental health problems\u2014it\u2019s narrower than saying arts and mental health. We went through a process. One of the key questions that we always ask ourselves is given a small scale where can a quite modest amount of money, but over a fairly long period of time, at least 10 years, where is it likely to have some impact? There was a great deal of concern about people with mental health problems at the time that has only increased very, very substantially, I would assume, in other countries as well, but very definitely in the UK, particularly among younger people. We went through a process of analyzing a number of different options and feeling that that was one where, with patience, but with relatively small resources, some changes could be made.\u201d<\/p>\n As with all its initiatives, Baring brings in advisors with specific expertise. <\/strong><\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s only become more important for us to engage with people who have got lived experience of whatever area that we\u2019re talking about. And we don\u2019t only take advice from people who are appointed as formal advisers. We take advice from many, many people, and we commission events and and reports from many, many people.\u201d For this theme, there are two advisors who both have \u201ca track record of working in that field. It\u2019s important that they both came from ethnic minority communities and a lot of their work has also been with ethnic minority communities, and you have a white director in me. So there is a conscious, quite deliberate approach of, let\u2019s make sure we get advice from a broad selection of people. And that\u2019s also true about our trustees as well as our advisors. And there\u2019s concentric circles going out. It\u2019s a bit too structural just to focus on advisors because we\u2019re constantly taking advice from hundreds of arts organizations that we\u2019re working with. That is the most significant form of advice that we get.\u201d<\/p>\n We asked David to describe an exemplary project, and he chose Hospital Rooms<\/a>. <\/strong><\/p>\n \u201cIt was formed by a husband and wife team,\u201d David told us. \u201cOne\u2019s a curator, one\u2019s visual artist, and they had the experience of visiting a friend who was experiencing very severe mental health problems, and was on a psychiatric ward. It struck them how how poor the environment is for someone in those situations. Poor for staff, which is very, very important too. The thing in the psychiatric hospital is that you may possibly have been denied your liberty. It may be against your will, so it\u2019s even more important that that should be a a good environment. That started in 2017 and eight years later, they are now working with something like 50-plus artists, a number of whom are extremely famous worldwide, to go into psychiatric hospitals and co-create new environments in those hospitals both with patients and staff. Amazingly difficult, because all those organizations are under massive pressure. It\u2019s incredibly hard to get any funding from any of them.<\/p>\n \u201cI visited some. They are extraordinarily beautiful, but the process of how they\u2019ve done it is, of course, every bit as important. They\u2019ve been unique in my experience of having a partnership with a highly successful commercial gallery house that has generated income in a way that\u2019s very, very unusual in the sort of work that we fund. Even more importantly, they\u2019ve also then tried to scale things up by creating what they call digital art rooms. When they leave and they\u2019re no longer interacting with patients about what can be done in the hospital, there\u2019s now something like 60 video sessions<\/a>, really fun, high quality, very, very good artists doing them, which those patients can access themselves. But the really key thing is that they\u2019ve got free, high-quality art materials from a commercial organization, and they\u2019ve been given in a very attractive box to every psychiatric ward in England.\u201d <\/p>\n David went on to explain that the vast majority of organizations Baring has funded \u201care working in the community, and we\u2019re specifically funding them to work with men.<\/strong> We felt that the everyone was talking about\u2014for very good reason\u2014how few artists of color, artists from the global majority, were working in a creative mental health field, and why that\u2019s a problem, and we\u2019ve done lots of funding to change that. But the vast majority of artists are women, and there\u2019s quite an imbalance when it comes to community participation, with relatively few men involved. There\u2019s a number of really interesting things in the UK about working with mums with postnatal depression or postnatal mental health problems, but we\u2019re funding a couple of projects that are using music to work with dads. It\u2019s a huge range across different art forms in the community.\u201d <\/p>\n The Baring Foundation site has a lot of excellent resources, including a series of \u201ccreatively minded\u201d publications. Here\u2019s one<\/a> about the work with men and mental health. <\/p>\n It was an interesting conversation<\/strong>. We focused on the useful distinction between projects that are explicitly designed as therapeutic interventions versus those understood as artistic experiences with all the freedom that entails. Fran\u00e7ois talked about his own learning along those lines working years ago with people with learning disabilities: \u201cWe created an artistic experience that gave them the freedom to do and be what they wanted to do within that. It was unusual in their experience that somebody wasn\u2019t trying to make them better, as it were, or bring about some therapeutic change.\u201d The difference matters greatly. We talked about the common expectation that when people have the freedom to make art it will be about the challenges they face versus the evident reality that people choose their subjects regardless of their circumstances. David described funding this work \u201cas a human right.\u201d<\/p>\n We also discussed the Baring Foundation\u2019s work in the larger context<\/strong>, for example, how it relates to public sector policies such as something quite common in the UK, \u201csocial prescribing,\u201d where any GP is authorized to prescribe arts activities or other experiences that enrich patients\u2019 lives. Listeners based outside the UK will be interested to learn that public-private cooperation in this realm is not always as hard to find as in the U.S. <\/p>\n Please tune in to hear the whole episode.<\/strong><\/p>\n I really like this Playing for Change international version of Jackson Browne\u2019s \u201cDoctor My Eyes<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n