Full Circle Arts ANNUAL REPORT 2009/10 Despite struggling with the financial implications of the recession in 2009 – 2010 we were able to not just to continue but expand our holistic provision working with both individuals and organisations towards inclusion in the arts for disabled people and artists. We saw real collaborations and partnerships flourish with joint projects of exceptional quality produced and underway with organisations such as: Cornerhouse, Manchester Metropolitan University, AND Festival, Future Everything, Jigsaw, Skylight, Oldham Link, and Bolton Octagon. Our holistic programme Source 2 (project funded by Grants for the Arts) came to an end and was fully evaluated and assessed in 2009/10. As an organisation we learnt a great deal from this programme over and above the events and services it delivered to our users, and this will inform our practise in the years to come. Disabled young people and practitioners want to be included in the arts and creative opportunities that most of their peers take for granted. One participant said “I am still on the outside looking in, we fought long and hard for an end to special education, but if you want to be involved in the arts there is little that is inclusive about any development opportunities, you are expected to be segregated into ‘special arts’ but I‘d rather be on the inside, involved, taking part in what my non disabled arts friends are involved in”. Inclusion is about all of us about creating & sharing tools, resources, capacities, a process not a product. It’s never ‘finished’ – nor is collaboration. For us at Full Circle Arts it’s about building bridges not towers. It’s about lighting small fires wherever we can rather than building a bonfire. It’s common sense, it’s respect, it’s listening and its us all working together.
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In June 2009 at Bridgewater Hall we planned and hosted Never Dive Alone, a conference and Open Space event for building collaborative partnerships and exploring issues of inclusion. The event was designed as a coming together of present and future working partners, artists and disabled people, interested in a dialogue or conversations around inclusion in the arts. There were opportunities for delegates to reflect on their learning, and space for them to consider the implications of four presentations, including one from FCA’s Vicki McCorkill. The event gave us the opportunity to roll our sleeves up and actively engage with the issues. For too long inclusion, diversity, reach and engagement have been seen as a ‘bolt on‘ to artistic practice and the main work of arts organisations. Perhaps the new landscape could help us appreciate them as core values, without which we cannot deliver quality or equality. We looked at the value of collaboration, openness, participation and personalisation for inclusion. A full transcript of the presentations is available to read from http://www.full-circle-arts.co.uk/ourwork We anticipate that collaborative working will be increasingly important in the difficult times ahead, as public funding for the arts is reduced, and Full Circle already has good connections and partnerships with other organisations. In 2009/10 we also collaborated with Manchester Metropolitan University on Present Difference, an international conference looking at the cultural production of disability. We worked with MMU to provide arts and cultural content to a 3 day series of academic presentations including presenting work produced during our participatory projects. We also worked to bring the following artists to the conference to show their work. Shira Anvi, Tom Bieling, Sean Burn, Lennard Davis, Justin Edgar (104 films) Ju Gosling The Magic Hour, Nicola Grove, Jim Ferris, Outside-Centre, Paul Darke and Jaqueline Roy A collaboration with Cornerhouse on a participatory project for young people (Interact, detailed below) begun at the end of this financial year will continue and develop – we will be working with them and Gaby Jenks on AND festival,
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advising on how to bring disabled artists into their programme to be seen in the context of a high profile ‘mainstream’ festival, working and collaborating with their non-disabled peers. We are proud of the links, connections and collaborations we are making particularly in regards to technology, digital and social media. This work will hopefully continue and develop through a planned GftA bid in 2010/11 and is developing our practice and building capacity - not just for ourselves but for our disabled users/artists.
Projects with Young People One of our proudest successes has been the Source Young Artist pilot, run in 2009/10. An intensive development service for young disabled people age 18 to 30, who have a keen interest and commitment to pursuing arts training, education and careers in the arts, SYA was our first structured development service for 18 to 30 year olds. Over twelve months the service offered: Personal Development Planning as offered to our adult artists; accredited and non-accredited training, including the opportunity to achieve Silver Arts Award; development workshops incorporating an opportunity to design, manage and deliver their own arts project to other young people; mentoring and signposting/support to gain work experience, develop networks and access further training. All five participants achieved their Silver Arts Award, and in addition to the artistic skills developed they now have a better practical understanding of creative facilitation and project management and an improved awareness of where they are on their journey to become an arts professional. Full Circle Arts and the SYA Team would like to thank the following individuals/organisations who contributed to either training, development workshops, mentoring, venue, work experience or additional arts experience. 3
Arts Award, Hub 4 training, Rachel Preston, Caz Brader, Kerry Tuhill, Tanya Raabe, Derek Cully, Maya Chowdhry, Sarah Platts, Michelle Oakes, Schani Cave, Ray Biggs, Karren Morris, Nathan Pendlebury, Nicky Hatton at PANDA, Creative Breaks, DIY Theatre, Contact Theatre, Jaime Patterson at So Many Words, Zion Arts Centre, Greenroom and Chinese Arts Centre. A second Source Young Artists scheme will form a key part of a Grants for the Arts bid planned for 2010/11. Remix Between February 09 and June 09 we ran a series of outreach workshops throughout Greater Manchester. These workshops fed into our large scale summer arts project Remix in July 2009 held at the Zion Centre with 80 young disabled people from all over the area. The young people worked with fourteen artists doing; drama, animation & stop motion, photography, dance, music, visual arts and digital Graffiti with the process being the most important part of the project, making sure every young person was ‘included’ on their own terms, with a huge sense of possibility and ambition. Work produced by the participants included animated shorts incorporating background music composed by those in the music workshop sessions. The animation and video diary of the project can be seen at our website, on our You Tube Channel and also at http://fullcircleartsblog.wordpress.com a free blog space Full Circle Arts set up for this project to take advantage of social media, to widen our audiences and importantly to show the young people how they can create and show their own work using a minimum of equipment and technical know how. Photographs of the project can be seen at http://www.flickr.com/photos/fullcirclearts/
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AIM Arts In Motion was the project designed, managed and facilitated by those who had committed to Full Circle Arts Source Young Artist programme and was delivered to other young disabled people from the Greater Manchester area. AIM took place over two days in August 2009 at the Zion Arts Centre in Manchester and grew from the idea of an arts relay, the passing of an art form onto another to encourage the development of characters, themes and stories. A short documentation of the project (produced by an SYA participant with support from one of our established artists) can be viewed on our website or You Tube Channel. Interact The beginning of March 09 saw the start of our collaborative project with Cornerhouse, funded by Mediabox, working with The Sancho Plan to produce an interactive, animated audio-visual installation, which will be showcased in one of Cornerhouse’s galleries in June 2010. This is almost a first in ‘true’ inclusive collaboration for Full Circle Arts, and has been led by the knowledge gained from the Source 2 Programme, regarding the practice, needs and wants of today’s young disabled people and practitioners. From the very first this project was truly collaborative; all companies and participants (young disabled people and young refugees/asylum seekers) worked together in the design, the how, the who, the where, the when, and the fundraising! We learned together the process for fully inclusive creative participatory work and we are still learning. It’s exciting for everyone, particularly when we see our young disabled participants who had never visited Cornerhouse before now feel at home there, say they will visit again and most importantly, say they feel able to join in any future participative opportunities Cornerhouse has to offer. We look forward to the second part of the project in June 2010 when the public will see, experience and interact with our work.
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Services to Artists Mentoring is now firmly within our core provision and our service leads the way for mentoring and inclusive practice in the arts. The continuity and one-to-one contact and support that mentoring provides remains a key strength with regards positive outcomes for all mentees. Professional Development Planning - Our Artist Development coordinator Vicki McCorkill completed her accredited training with PINNA and hopes to attend further coaching courses later in the 2010 calendar year. The PDP service and our in-house developed toolkits remain a well used service; in 2009/10 10 artists requested our PDP during the year with 7 taking full use of all 3 sessions and follow up. The benefits can be clearly seen below where the blue bars show where the disabled artists ranked themselves before using the PDP service and the pink bars showing where they ranked themselves after.
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Digital/web and Information services Artists Artist’s featured on the site have been contacted to produce commissions, lead workshops and to take part in projects all over the UK. Signposting artists to training or relevant opportunities and keeping them up to date with what’s available for them to utilise is invaluable for the artists. Promoting a different artist each month on the website as well as the newsletter has proved to be very beneficial for the artists, giving them the opportunity to showcase their work to a wider audience. There are now 36 professional and emerging artists featured on source:artists. Artists have also found our toolkit section valuable with the addition this year of career development toolkits to the fundraising toolkits already available. Source:it Newsletter Each week we’re inundated with requests to advertise jobs, training and events occurring throughout the North West and beyond, within the newsletter. Subscriptions have increased by 50% in this year alone. Source:it includes direct links to our website and features artists and venues and has proved very popular. Each fortnight the number of subscribers grows as well as the newsletter itself. The Web In addition to our own website and the services above in the last 12 months we have increased our web presence, we now have our work on a host of social media sites and channels to open up a conversation with our users and audiences: Facebook: over 2,000 friends; Twitter: over 1,000 followers by March 2010; a flickr account to enable visitors to see photos of our events and a youtube account which shows films made by and with young people. Staff and management
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In October 2009 our long term administrator retired, and our Arts Project Officer left us for opportunities on the other side of the world. As a company we then took the decision not to replace these staff in full, but to have only a part time administrator and to recruit project officers on project specific contracts. While this does reduce capacity within the permanent management team, we are confident that by building freelance costs into project bids that our services will not suffer – and our increased online presence allows us to deliver our services more efficiently and directly to our users. All staff have undertaken training during the year, arranged as they need and request it. The company aims to preserve this budget even in difficult times, as investing in our staff is the best way to ensure the sustainability of the organization. Although several of our management committee retired this year the core remains consistent and include our representatives of our artists and young people. Diversity training is planned for June 2010, available to the Board members, and other training and support is available as required. In 2009/10 the registered directors of Full Circle Arts were: Tom Raines Geoff Riley Elliott Thompson Damien Hayward Janet Charlesworth Derek Culley Michelle Oakes In 2009/10 we received funding from: Arts Council of England, AGMA, Manchester City Council, Grants for the Arts (the Arts Council Lottery programme)
SHORT COMPANY ACCOUNTS FULL CIRCLE ARTS 8
2009-2010 INCOME
09 10
08 09
REVENUE EARNED PROJECT OTHER
£ 155,537 £ 5,252 £ 8,792 £ 69
£ 151,914 £ 3,213 £ 41,948 £ 1,196
TOTAL
£ 169,650
£ 198,271
SALARIES OVERHEADS PROJECTS
£ 106,405 £ 51,914 £ 43,409
£ 128,210 £ 62,395 £ 45,406
TOTAL
£ 201,728
£ 236,011
EXPENDITURE
NET MOVEMENT FUNDS AT 31ST MARCH 09 FUNDS AT 31 MARCH 10
ASSETS FIXED
£ 94,220 £ 62,142
09 10
08 09 £ 24,631
£ 29,907
£ 18,271 £ 22,809
£ 22,418 £ 44,996
TOTAL:
£ 41,080
£ 67,414
CREDITORS DUE WITHIN 1 YR NET CURRENT ASSETS
£ 3,569 £ 37,511
£ 3,101 £64,313
£ 62,142
£ 94,220
CURRENT: DEBTORS CASH AT BANK & IN-HAND
TOTAL ASSETS
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Full Circle Arts 7, The Schoolhouse Second Avenue Trafford Park Manchester M17 1DZ Telephone: 0161 872 0326 Email: info@fullcirclearts.co.uk Website: http://www.fullcirclearts.co.uk/ Wordpress Blog: http://fullcircleartsblog.wordpress.com/ You Tube: http://www.youtube.com/fullcirclearts Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/fullcirclearts Twitter: http://twitter.com/full_circle_art Flickr: http://www.flickr.com/photos/fullcirclearts Issuu: http://issuu.com/full_circle_arts A company limited by guarantee, registered in England, number: 2312426 Registered Charity number: 700918
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