ARVON
BUSINESS PLAN 2015-18

NOVEMBER 2014

Arvon Business Plan 2015-18 - Contents

  1. Overview
  1. Background

Mission statement

Arvon’s values

The Arvon ethos

Arvon’s current programme

  1. Arvon’s strategic aims
  1. Equality Action Plan
  2. Audience Development Plan
  3. Budget
  1. Overview

The Arvon Business Plan 2015-18 has four key aims:

  1. To produce high quality residential writing courses that champion

creativity in our unique writing houses in England.

  1. To extend our reach and support for writers from all parts of

society, and to advocate for the possibility of transformation

through creative writing.

  1. To establish a new offering to talented writers.
  1. To make sure our business model is sustainable and resilient, to enable us to be bold and ambitious.
  1. Background

Arvon’s mission statement

Arvon believes that everyone has the potential to discover their imagination through creative writing. Open to everyone, Arvon’s courses challenge, inspire and transform people’s creative lives.

Arvon’s values

Welcome, inspire, support, transform

The Arvon ethos

At Arvon everyone is a writer, regardless of their writing experience or background. Everyone has a voice to be heard, and we are all about offering a space where people can discover this. We cultivate a welcomingatmosphere, as informal, fun and friendly as possible, where learning takes place as part of a ‘community of writers’.

We believe writing matters, and time spent on writing is time well spent, nourishing the imagination and deepening the connection to self and world. We look to create the ideal conditions that allow people to immerse themselves in their imagination and creative process, away from the distractions of everyday life.

We believe in the importance of the apprentice model of learning- that creative writing is a craft that can be learnt, and one of the most powerful ways of learning is as apprentice to an expert. Arvon tutors all are published writers, chosen for both the quality of their expertise in the craft of writing and their generous desire to pass this on to others.

Writing takes practice - the best way of learning is by doing,and so the best way to improve writing is to write.

Arvon’s current programme

Arvon’s main programme of work can be divided across seven strands of activity:

  • Open Programme
  • Arvon City
  • Residentials for Schools
  • Residentials for Partners
  • Professional Development
  • Arvon Digital
  • Arvon Events

Arvon Open Programme

The open programme is an annual programme of five day creative writing residential courses at our three centres. Each course has a maximum capacity of 16 participants. A grant is available is to help people on a low or no income.

The open programme is intended for writers from all ranges of experience aged 16+, and is open to writers of all economic, social, geographic and ethnic backgrounds and across multiple genres. Starting to Write courses are intended for beginner writers, our Work-in-Progress and Retreat courses are intended for emerging and experienced writers, and all remaining courses are intended for mixed abilities.

Our courses also attract those wishing to develop industry skills, particularly on the more industry-focused courses, such as Writing for Games and Writing TV Drama.

Arvon City

Arvon City is a three day non-residential course programme held in English cities, delivered in partnership with regional partners who have a way of reaching out to potential participants who are unable to come to a remote setting for reasons including financial commitment and responsibility for dependents, and /or who prefer a shorter course close to home. We currently offer ‘closed’ Arvon City courses, where we work with a targeted audience eg young people or people with mental health issues, and ‘open’ Arvon City courses, open to public booking and supported by regional partners.

Residentials for schools

Arvon hosts five day residential creative writing courses for primary, secondary and independent schools at the three Arvon centres. Grants are available to subsidise selected primary and state schools. Ages range from 10 to 18 years old.

Residentials for Partners

Arvon hosts five day residential creative writing courses for community and arts organisation. Grants are available to subsidise selected partnerships. Ages range from 10 to adults.

Arvon Professional Development

Arvon’s professional development programme seeks to aid the development of writers, and of writer-teachers. It is comprised of the following projects:

  • Jerwood-Arvon Mentoring Scheme is an annual programme providing mentorship for 9 emerging writers. It is aimed at emerging writers resident in the UK.
  • Arvon Tutor Development – a programme to teach the teachers of creative writing, including a residential week for 16 Arvon tutors and a creative writing teaching programme delivered with NAWE.
  • Open Programme Grants for Teachers (Around 30 teachers apply each year to access grants).
  • Teach Writinginitiative for teachers in the West Midlands, including an Arvon residential week for teachers.
  • The Spoken Word Education Programme (SWEP) for poets working in London schools (delivered in partnership).
  • Hollick Arvon Caribbean Writers Prize – mentoring programme for one Caribbean writer per year.
  • TLC Free-Read Scheme for 10 Arvon grant recipients a year.

Arvon Digital

We are in the process of establishing an Arvon online community, connecting writers to Arvon tutors and to each other, and making arvon.org a destination for expertise on the craft of writing.

Arvon Events

We run occasional live literary events, such as House of Words open programme launch event and the Jerwood/ Arvon Mentoring Programme launch at Free Word Centre, London, and local community events at the centres, such as Fun Palace Lumb Bank. We also put on post-residential events in partnership with schools and partner organisations.

  1. Arvon Strategic Aims
  1. To produce high quality residential writing courses that champion creativity in our unique writing houses in England.

The programme Arvon proposes has at its heart our belief that everyone can benefit from the opportunity to explore their creative potential through engagement in creative writing.

In each of the three years, Arvon will produce 83 residential writing courses in our centres located in Devon, Shropshire and Yorkshire. These courses, run through our open programme, will reach more than 1300 aspiring writers.

We will also offer 50 residential weeks for schools and community groups in each of the three years, additionally reaching over 800 young people and adults, many from disadvantaged backgrounds.

Within the programme we will demonstrate genuine ambition in our approach to delivering artistic opportunity. Alongside the popular starting to write, fiction and poetry courses Arvon is aware of and, chooses to offer its writers, innovative forms of writing such as writing for games, graphic novel, and experimental typography. This also widens the range of writers we can serve.

Every course is tutored by published writers chosen for their expertise and their ability to share their skill and knowledge of the craft of writing. We have a pool of writers which we are constantly refreshing with new blood, as new genres emerge in the literature world. In each of the three years we will provide paid work for over 420 professional writers as tutors. We are committed to paying our tutors a fair wage, and we review the fee annually.

Our three writing houses are all based in England and attract writers from all over the UK and further afield. The properties are in remote, breathtakingly beautiful locations and in which our professional team works hard to create a supportive environment that fosters intense creativity.

  1. To extend our reach and support for writers from all parts of society, and to advocate for the possibility of transformation through creative writing.

Arvon recognises the importance of understanding and removing barriers to engagement in the arts.

We are willing to test the boundaries of our own and others’ versions of diversity and are prepared to talk about difficult issues or conflicts that might arise. Arvon is also committed to being open and transparent to increase diversity, by sharing the vision and reality with audiences and stakeholders. We aim to celebrate diversity, exploring all the artistic and creative opportunities it offers, and to further develop our understanding of its creative potential and the ways in which it can promote long-term organisational resilience.

While Arvon intends to increase its reach and support for writers from all parts of society, we have identified two priority audiences that have traditionally a low engagement with the arts and that we wish to deepen our engagement with. They are

  1. Under 25 year olds
  2. Low / no income

We have also developed a strategic plan to deepen and extend our engagement with

  1. Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic (BAME) writers
  2. Disabled writers
  3. England residents living outside South of England

See Equality Action Plan and Audience Development Plan for Arvon’s approach to reaching these audiences.

Advocacy

Arvon has deep roots; achievement; reputation; integrity; connections.

We will use these significant advantages to multiply our effect by:

  • Deepening our engagement with supporters already involved e.g. Trustees; Patrons; Friends; writers we work with; participants
  • Advocating to educationalists
  • Literature peers
  • Feeding professional development
  • Making use of networks e.g. disseminating to international contacts
  1. To establish a new offering to talented writers.

We plan to realise our vision to create a new facility in the Clockhouse at The Hurst which will house talented writers on retreat in comfortable accommodation.

The Clockhouse Retreats will:

  • Support Arvon’s talent development across a wide range of writers and genres
  • Respond to demand that we have evidenced through research we have conducted with writers and publishers in London and Birmingham
  • Provide a unique facility for writers in England
  • Allow us to experiment with different offerings to suit writer preference
  • Support Arvon writers and invest in their development. They in turn will become ambassadors for the retreat offering
  • Create a potential new income stream
  • Establish The Hurst as a place where Arvon is creating a community of writers
  • Build on Arvon’s reputation as the leading creative writing charity in England
  • Help establish Arvon’s international profile which is growing through our initiative the Hollick Arvon Caribbean Prize, and the increasing attendance on our courses by overseas writers.

Following a one off donation, Arvon has the opportunity to develop the Clockhouse Retreats in 2015. We aim to complete the work to renovate the building by autumn 2015, and plan a soft launch by the end of the year.

At the end of 3 years we would like the Clockhouse Retreats to be established as a first class facility that has a healthy waiting list and a growing reputation as an inspirational resource for writers.

  1. To make sure our business model is sustainable and resilient, to enable us to be bold and ambitious.

The current economic and fundraising environments pose a number of challenges to Arvon’s long-term financial sustainability, and we therefore plan to undertake considerable work to strengthen our resilience in this area.

During the period of this three year business plan, we will:

  • Undertake a thorough review our business model, to consider points of strength and weakness in our income and expenditure, to test long-standing assumptions, and to develop risk-based strategies to address areas of weakness.
  • Formulate and begin implementing new strategies to maximise the potential of our existing income streams, while enabling our strategic plans to target underrepresented groups.
  • Devise and pilot a diverse range of new potential income streams for work that contribute to our artistic goals, and attract new audiences, to identify the feasibility of these streams to increase resilience.
  • Identify new strand of artistic activity and advocacy to enable Arvon to have a greater impact for the same investment.
  • Review our cost base, with a particular focus on fixed costs, and consider options to reduce these costs in the medium term.
  • Formulate a new business model based on our findings, to form the basis of our next business plan from 2018 to 2021.