Keynote at Arts & Business Northern Ireland symposium Feb 2023

My name is Shoubhik Bandopadhyay. It’s a Bengali name, which is where my dad’s family is from, and it means something like ‘respected wizard’. My parents had high hopes [no laughs here - was getting nervous]. I’ve been working in culture since 2009, as a musician, a producer and programmer, a researcher and, as of 31st October last year, I have been the Head of Arts at the Paul Hamlyn Foundation. This is my first job in grantmaking and it’s great to be here in my 10th week talking to all of you. For those of you who don’t know the organisation, we are a philanthropic foundation based in London and we were founded in 1987. We’ve been funding art and culture ever since then and have over time also broadened our scope into youth work, migration and education and learning in the arts. This financial year we are on target to make £6.5m in grants through our APF.

I have to admit, I was stunned but also thrilled when our chief executive Moira offered me this job. Both she and I were aware that it is a risk, one I hope she is not regretting, but it reflects the change that both Paul Hamlyn Foundation and the wider philanthropic sector is seeking to make. Like the cultural sector, philanthropy has been an exclusive and homogenous sector for a long time, especially at senior leadership levels, and I feel that PHF hiring me is a small signal that funders are beginning to recognise the power imbalances in the world of trusts and foundations and are starting to bring in some more diverse perspectives to challenge their thinking and come up with new solutions to the problems they are trying to address.

However, my darker skin and a difficult to pronounce name can also be misleading. I may be a second-generation immigrant from a refugee family, but I was raised in relative privilege, I was privately educated and I had individual violin lessons from the age of 7 [this got a lot more laughs than expected]. I’m sharing this because I want to acknowledge that representation is only a small element of the progress we need to see and also because you should know that whoever is reading your applications brings their own experiences and perspectives into that process. Foundations can appear opaque and unapproachable but on the other side of that is probably someone grappling with many of the same issues as you are on a personal level. So what I want to do today is share my own impressions two months in on what is going on inside the foundation and where things might be headed in terms of our future priorities.

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The fund reopened a year ago after shifting focus to emergency funding during the height of the covid-19 pandemic. Like many institutions in the charity, arts and social sectors, we emerged from that period humbled. Humbled by the incredible organisations and services we supported through emergency funding but also humbled by the experiences of junior staff working from home in less-than-ideal conditions and people of colour, especially black colleagues, who were traumatised after the murder of George Floyd and mobilised by the resurgence of Black Lives Matter. Upon reopening, Paul Hamlyn Foundation made a public commitment to social justice, to equity and to anti-racism, and across our organisation we’re trying to make good on this commitment, whilst acknowledging that we as a philanthropic foundation have been complicit in some of the harm caused previously, although this was never our intention. My motivations for joining Paul Hamlyn were to try and address this issue within the Arts Access and Participation Fund specifically:

1. To develop a clearer sense of purpose for the fund. What is our vision for the cultural sector and the wider system in which it sits, and what is our role within this?

Paul Hamlyn’s early grants in the arts were to give subsidised tickets to the Royal Opera House to children of care workers. At the time it was a radical approach, especially for a family foundation. Would we fund something like this today? I think it’s unlikely, but this was the beginning of a process of shifting power away from large institutions and high culture elitism towards the grassroots and the wider public. The questions we have to ask now are how far along in this process are we, how far do we want to go and what is the next radical step that we can take to show leadership and drive change in the sector?

I’m currently working on this question with my team and, although we haven’t arrived at an answer, there are a few emerging ideas that I can share with you now.

The first is that we are looking at a broader definition of art and culture, recognising that the subsidised arts sector definition has tended towards a definition which now feels narrow and out of date. Rather than looking at culture as a pre-defined set of activities which take place in institutions and venues, we are asking ourselves what the cultural life of the various communities in this country looks like. Where do they meet to share ideas or build relationships? How do they meet the impulse to create and express? What would they do with £150k over three years and who are the gatekeepers we can work with? These questions excite us because they offer the opportunity to address power imbalances from the ground up. This wouldn’t mean that we no longer seek to support institutions and organisations, of course they would remain an important part of our portfolio, but it could give us another approach with which to effect change and broadens the spectrum of work we support.

Secondly, we are using tools such as systems change thinking to guide our grantmaking principles. This is leading us to recognise the importance of maintaining healthier ecosystems of institutions, artists and audiences who all support each other, rather than treating each grant in isolation. It also means that we thinking more deeply about where inequities are created in this system, and looking for projects which address these issues. One example which comes to mind is the freelance workforce, who often miss out on support from funders, but who are such a vital part of the arts sector. Finding ways to support their wellbeing, their skills development and advocate for their value in the sector is something I think we’ll look to do more of in the future.

Thirdly, we are also looking at applicants’ internal working practices through an antiracist and equity lens, recognising that staff wellbeing needs to be a priority for successful grantees. Cultural workers are gluttons for punishment, we know this, and their dedication to their work is a great strength of the sector, but for a long time we have downplayed extractive working practices in the service of ‘good work’. Today, funders cannot make this distinction, both for ethical reasons and for reputational ones, especially as organisations rely on staff from marginalised communities to help make their own working cultures more inclusive.

What might this look like in terms of our portfolio? (I stress the word might here, any actual changes to our vision and criteria will be published as part of our guidance documents, ts and cs apply etc etc)

We might look to support more artist collectives or organisations based in their community

We might fund more partnership projects

We might fund more organisations delivering sector or workforce support

We might give more support for core costs and follow grantees’ organisational development and wider networks and impact rather than focusing on individual projects.

Where we do support access schemes or project delivery, it might focus more on innovative approaches  

We might not support organisations whose own organisational culture presents concerns for staff wellbeing

So, that’s on the purpose of the fund. My second ambition is to give applicants and grantees the best possible experience when applying to the fund, whether they are successful or not.

If you’ve applied to us recently, you’ll be familiar with our two-stage application, and I think that it has a lot of strengths, particularly with the introduction of enquiry calls, which organisations based in Northern Ireland can make use of before submitting. However, it also creates a lot of work for both grants managers and applicants and is quite an opaque process from the outside, especially when we have to decline nearly 90% of the applications we receive. We feel that we can’t give applicants the kinds of constructive declinations they deserve based on the amount of work that goes into the applications, so this is something we want to work on.

We also know that in order to invite in new types of organisations who don’t have experience or expertise in fundraising, or have greater access needs we’ll need to offer more ways to apply. This offers a range of exciting possibilities, as we all know that the written word is a limiting way to describe creative work, and one which privileges certain people over others.

We’ll be putting users at the heart of this process to understand how we can make a more transparent, accessible and equitable application.

So that’s me and my plans for the next few months at PHF. Thank you all for listening. I hope there has been some food for thought in there, and if you want to chat more please find me. Especially if you disagree, I’d love to talk.