Last Friday to the HISEZ conference at the Centre for Health Sciences, which, incidentally, is one of the many remarkable new buildings which now grace Inverness. HISEZ is very much a sister organisation to HI~Arts: we are both contracted by the Strengthening Communities team of Highlands and Islands Enterprise, and we collaborate on supporting cultural organisations which are also social enterprises (or are aspiring to that status).

And if your eyes have just glazed over at the sight of terms like ‘strengthening communities’, ‘cultural organisations’ and ‘social enterprises’, then I don’t blame you. We arts bureaucrats have to use this kind of language all the time, but it’s not exactly user-friendly for the uninitiated.

When I joined HI~Arts at the start of 1994, ‘enterprise’ was the buzz word. The old HIDB, much loved by some, excoriated by others, had recently morphed into Highlands and Islands Enterprise, and all its area offices had become Local Enterprise Companies, or LECs. Now those LECs themselves have gone the way of all bureaucracies, and we’re back to talking about HIE’s ‘Area Offices’. And the term ‘enterprise’ itself has now been prefaced by ‘social’ to create the rather mysterious—for artists and artsworkers at least—new concept ‘Social Enterprise’. This of course parallels the similar shift in terminology at a national level, from the Scottish Arts Council to Creative Scotland.

Keynote speaker at the HISEZ conference was John Bird, founder of the Big Issue, and he was in no doubt whatsoever about the purpose of social enterprises: they are about creating opportunities for ‘the poor’ to get out of the ‘giving’ trap and start to make their own futures. (I know what he means, but his continued use of the term kept reminding me of John Cleese as Robin Hood in that little masterpiece, Time Bandits: ‘Have you met the Poor?’ see: www.youtube.com/watch?v=167IhlXnN2Y ).

Now, that model of a ‘social enterprise’ works very well if we’re talking about Blindcraft (which,founded in 1793, probably counts as the world’s oldest SE), or Ness Soaps – businesses which use their retail trade to create employment opportunities for those who might not otherwise find a job. And there are a few specialist arts organisations which also clearly fit that model, such as Moray-based Out of the Darkness theatre company.

Screen Machine 2

But most funded arts organisations are themselves recipients of ‘giving’. They are the deserving poor. They often exist, after all, to address ‘market failure’. That is, they needed public funding in the first place because the activities they undertake can’t readily function in a commercial marketplace. Opera is the most obvious case (though Ellen Kent seems to do quite well out of staging ‘commercial’ opera productions), but perhaps the most overt example here in the Highlands and Islands is the Screen Machine mobile cinema (founded by HI~Arts but now operated by Regional Screen Scotland). The Screen Machine exists to bring a high quality, up to date cinema experience to small and remote communities, especially on islands.

Now cinema is a commercial artform. But providing cinema to remote communities is not a commercial proposition. If a commercial operator could do the job, they would be doing so. However, if RSS tried to raise more of its income through trading, rather than public funding, it would face a stark choice: either raise its ticket prices to an unacceptable degree, or take the Machine out of its normal circuit to undertake commercial hires. Both strategies would run the risk of undermining the basis of the Machine’s existing public funding.

And the other complicating factor is this: is delivering the arts in itself a social ‘good’? That is, does, say, a professional theatre company qualify as a ‘social enterprise’ if its main activity is, like the Screen Machine, touring productions to rural communities? Or does an arts organisation only qualify for the term if it uses its arts activities, like Out of the Darkness, to serve a more immediate social need?

These are far from academic questions. HIE’s Strengthening Communities teams, centrally and in the former LEC offices, are now dedicated to supporting ‘social enterprises of growth’, and HI~Arts is charged with building capacity in those cultural organisations which might have the potential to meet that definition. How many cultural enterprises will be able to step up to this mark? But, viewed another way, how many cultural enterprises can afford not to start thinking like this, as we enter the worst public spending environment in living memory?

If the financial meltdown was the equivalent of a Chicxulub meteor, then which cultural organisations will be the dinosaurs, and which will be the proto-mammals, emerging to occupy newly-vacant evolutionary niches?

And in an environment in which even libraries are threatened with closure, and even police officers are facing redundancy, how do we make the best possible case for both the innate and the instrumental values of the arts?

These are just some of the questions which, I’m sure, will be aired at the HIE/Creative Scotland conference ‘Old Maps and New’ (www.hi-arts.co.uk/HI-Arts%20Services/Conference-2010.htm), also in the Centre for Health Sciences, on November 12 and 13, and which HI~Arts is organising on HIE’s behalf. Places are limited, so book now to add your voice to the debate!

© Robert Livingston, 2010