Arts Activated Transcript: Track 8 - 20th September 2016
The Social Impact of Funding Initiatives
PAUL NUNNARI:
Ladies and gentlemen, lunch will be served from 1 PM to 1:30 PM. So we are going to take this session probably until 1 PM, if that's OK? No, yeah...
We are just waiting for Simon to be miked up, so if you can just there with us for a few more minutes.
PAUL NUNNARI:
Ladies and gentlemen, I'm from the Department of Premier and Cabinet and I managed event access and inclusion for that department. It's a role I enjoy and I get the privilege to work with lots of various people.
The panel today will be talking on qualifying and quantifying individual and social impact of the arts. We have got Simon Darcy, Jenny Simone and Nia and I will leave them to introduce themselves. I will hand over to Simon now.
SIMON DARCY:
Welcome. (Inaudible)
..always seeking funding and seeking to demonstrate to the funders, whether that the government, the not-for-profit sector, philanthropists or others that are coming forward with money, how to understand how arts, first and foremost, aspects of disability arts can resonate beyond the project and the performance.
So we were commissioned – and we will talk about that in a little while – to look at the social impact of disability arts partnership projects. We are going to give a short background and then look at the process of what we did, the results that came out of that. And it has really resonated a lot with what we have been talking about this morning already.
And I would suggest that what many people in the room are experiencing, there are commonalities no matter what type of arts you are involved with. Whether it is performance, visual, or audiovisual arts.
Clicking over? Click. OK. Come back one. Oops. I'm from the Uni of technology, so this is great that the tech is even working.
So, being researchers, we went back to look at the literature and evolution of disability and arts, arts and disability, or disability arts. And again, I think that was fantastic, the keynote from this morning that was saying we all have different nomenclature in the way it is explained or understood and there is no right or wrong. There is a history behind that.
But certainly there has been a domination in aspects of Australia, looking at an arts as occupying the time of people with disability rather than focusing on art for art's sake and the outcome of that. So this project was certainly at the professional end, and professional to development.
And what I found interesting about that was where those literatures appeared. And I won't spend too much time on that. But I will say that I was surprised by there not being more developed literature around social impact of arts and disability. And most of that was predominantly from Europe and the US, with much more of a body of work.
So I thought we would move on and rather than me talking about why we were chosen to do the job, we've actually got Nia Carl from arts New South Wales. I will just throw to her and get her to briefly comment on why they went with us as researchers because we are not arts specialists.
NIA CARL:
I'm Nia Carl from Arts New South Wales, which is the arts policy and investment agency and we support art in all its forms across New South Wales.
Timing can be interesting. Around 2011, the Department of family services in New South Wales was developing a new strategic plan, Stronger Together, and was looking at ways to reduce barriers of participation by people with disabilities across all social and economic life.
We developed a little partnership with them from 2012, the New South Wales arts and disability partnership which had four strands in that first year, one big funding participation processes to increase participation of people with disability in professional arts. We also funded research project to look into the social impact of some of those projects.
And so we commissioned a two year study which UTS was successful in getting, to look at 12 of the projects that were funded in that first year. It was a two year research project to focus on the social impact and social inclusion of those participation projects.
UTS, Simon and Jenny and the team had done some really interesting work, for example, surf life saving was one area. They were able to take models of social capital and social inclusion and refine and test their model specifically with these professional arts projects.
One of the things that is quite remarkable about it is that the projects themselves were very diverse. Some were quite lengthy projects, some where short, the depth of engagement was different in all projects, the number of participants both with and without disability was quite varied as well. It was good to commission some research that was going to look at diversity across different art forms.
We are delighted that the research has come out of that and our work with UTS. In particular, one of the really interesting things is this 33 factors of indicators of social inclusion that the project has refined.
This research is going to be very important for government agencies, for artists with disability, arts organisations, local government, a broad spectrum we hope, in an area where there haven't been much research.
But over to you, Simon. This is important research and we were very happy to support it with the Department of family and community services.
SIMON DARCY:
I should have introduced Simone Faulker and Jenny Onyx who formed part of the team. I will throw to Jenny now, (inaudible) impact of active citizenship. Jenny, the screen is down the front, so you don't have to do what I do.
JENNY ONYX:
Social impact is extremely important and everybody talks about it and want to know what it is. But there has never been a proper measurement.
The government, particularly the Treasury, up until now has equated social impact with making money or saving money. And there's a process called social return on investment, which is basically a cost benefit analysis, and it measures the dollar value of what is done and what happens.
But of course, a lot of things aren't usually measured and those things simply got left out of the equation. We came in with a totally different approach and we are very fortunate that New South Wales Arts was responsive to this.
The two things we saw as different, first of all we see social impact as not something that happens at the end, but as a process. And if you want to know what happens with social impact, you have to see it as a process in that process starts inside the organisation.
We developed a model, and you can see part of it there. Bits of it are left off. I don't know. Can we shift it so you can see the rest of it? No, we can't. That's a model developed for surf lifesaving. We think the process of social impact is the same and so we started with that model from surf lifesaving and wanted to see if it could apply to organisations with disability.
The model used is the model of active citizenship that says you have social impact to the extent you can be an active citizen. We are not talking about leadership, we are talking about participation and impact generally.
But it all starts with organisation that is welcoming, and it starts with people in that organisation or in the project, those people feeling that they belong, a sense of belonging that this is mine, this is ours. We have it together. The values of the organisation, but not just the values. Their practices actually are just that.
That's always the first step and it has never been considered before. It's like the black box and you don't worry what the organisation is doing, but you do. You have to do.
If, and only if, you have a strong sense of belonging and welcoming, the next step is you develop values. The values are social values, of helping each other, working together, supporting each other, doing something important. They have to be reflected in the formal structure of the organisation, but also individuals developing that and participants developing that.
When that happens, networks are formed, skills are developed, human capital is developed, and the social, human, the skills, learning, sharing, these come together and reinforce each other. When all that happens, and only when all that happens, you start to get impacts outside the organisation itself.
The social impact starts with participants within the organisation, but then it moves beyond that, through the networks to all the people they are working with and ultimately to a wider audience. And so, that's what we were trying to see if we could measure.
We must emphasise that. At no point were we evaluating any particular project or organisation. We were just asking the question, how can we tell whether social impact is occurring and if it is, what does it look like?
And back to Simone.
SIMONE FAULKNER:
We took this apart into several steps. The first was a scoping phase where we did some focus groups and analysed at the narratives and images to see if we could come up with similar... To see if the themes would lead us and what the social impact model said.
Once that was done, I looked at Simon and myself to talk through the next part, which is the critical part we will report on today. We revised the model for the purposes of arts and disability.
Nia has already spoken through the complexity of the project. We had 12 very different projects, some with very different... Only a handful of participants, some with hundreds of participants. Regional and metro, professional and grassroots, a variety of media, mediums, and from many different types of organisations, arts, disability or a combination.
I won't talk to much to the slide because again, it talks about all of the actors involved in creating social impact for an organisation. Many of these we spoke with during our first scoping phase. We also spoke to audiences to gauge the responses to some of the different performances or artworks.
Jenny has spoken through the model, which is a slightly easier model to understand than the complex quantitative model that came out of the surf lifesaving study. Essentially, it shows the ripple begins in the organisation and flows down to the greater community.
This is what it looked like once we analysed our data. Unfortunately, some of the program factors are hidden by the script.
Thank you very much.
There were five program factors and five individual factors, whereas the surf lifesaving study brought in a few extra factors which were not applicable. Within those factors, we had several indicators. For each factor, there were about three to four indicators.
An example of an indicator, so for the belonging factor, we reflected on whether people developed trusting friendships through their participation of the program. We felt that the word and the factor belonging was quite complex, so we broke it up. And these flowed from the narrative were received in our discussions with the participants.
We came up with 33 indicators altogether. Simon, do you want to talk through this?
SIMON DARCY:
Yeah, I just need to bring out, up till now it was classic case study stuff. And we did that. We did deep, meaningful case study work and what has not come through so far is how much fun we had been involved.
We were going to performances, hanging out at rehearsals, seeing the creative process in its formative stages.
Or in some processes, a long way along those processes. And for people that came from outside the arts, that was exciting. To see projects at different stages in organisations that positioned arts in different ways. It was also a bloody messy and wicked and all the other Management words that are put around it. I am from the business School so I have to do that stuff as well.
So the idea of the abductive, bringing together qualitative and quantitative methods to make sense and to make a methodology that looks overall at the projects to come up with common ways of understanding those projects...
One of the things that didn't come out, that wasn't explicitly brought out when we were looking at the ripple model, is that above the line, it was about individuals. Below the line, it was about the projects.
So the way that we looked at the case studies was as a collective group of researchers. All of us could not be at all projects, but all of us went through all the data separately and then together to come up with a consensus around the way this was scored quantitatively from qualitative data.
Now, you've got to remember that these reports get scrutinised both academically. We are in review processes at the moment. And also from a government perspective. So we are looking at ways of saying not what is great art, but what is the social impact emerging from the arts?
Bear with me. On project two, there is a line going through what is called a radar. Think of it like a spider web, where it each point on the spiderweb is one of those factors you have already seen. As a group, we would sit down and look at those scores, look at the individual scores and come up with a consensus score.
What you can see on project two on the left is it had a reasonably large impact. And on the right, from the programs that were run, that the activity itself – the welcoming nature, underlying social values, networks and social impacts – were scored at the higher end of three and above on a scoring system of one to four.
So we were quantifying the qualitative that is in these deep case studies. If you go over to project five, you will get an understanding that project five had a wider impact on program factors and a much smaller impact on those individual factors.
SIMONE FAULKNER:
And I should say on the scoring system, 0 meant no evidence of that fact or the indicator a caring. And 4 meant a large amount of evidence of that happening.
SIMON DARCY:
Thanks, Simone. And it's evidence-based again. So we had to not only say that was the gut feel, we had to point to that evidence base coming out of the case studies of all sorts of different data. No data was common across all the projects.
What I will say on project five, which may have been more about grassroots engagement and getting some people involved in the arts for the first time is a very different type of project than one of our other projects that engaged professional mentors to work on business development and marketing plans for the sale of very well-developed artistic product in either 'zines or sculpture works. So we were right at the other end of where those works were scored more broadly.
So the key outcomes, and some of you guys are going to go, "That makes sense, what do we need to study about this?" But the belonging aspect of an ensemble that was a combination of artists with disabilities and in many of the cases, artists without disabilities working together, was trust and shared engagement.
So if you read that quote, "They make you feel welcome like someone who is feeling insecure, they'll say, 'We are all here to help each other and I'm helping you.' I feel at ease, I'm part of the group." So there is the respect not only for the individual at for the individual's varying abilities.
I was very privileged and I cannot say who, but sitting in on some of the rehearsal process and creative process development, where someone who hasn't said anything for the whole session then just comes up with this incredibly crystallising insight into what they are all going on about and everybody goes, "Yeah, that's what it is all about."
Oh, sorry, one other thing about the ensemble nature – some of these projects, this was the third iteration of funding they had had. So it was about that longevity of engagement. Secondly, project embeddedness which follows on from the first, "Our philosophy is creating an inclusive world and it's about getting the guys out in the community and being seen. When we bring them to this situation, it's not a case of here are some actors with disabilities. They are just actors and that's where we are very fortunate that a theatre company have got the same philosophy and said, "If you're going to come on board, guys, you've got to treat it as..."
Just stop that quote there and I will go to an experience I had at a theatre somewhere in Australia and I had a conversation with a critic and the critic said, "What am I going to do? That wasn't very good." And I said to him, "You write your story," because it's about the artistic merit of what is being seen.