NOTE: This post is to introduce you to the 51st episode of François Matarasso’s and my monthly podcast, “A Culture of Possibility.” It will be available starting 18 April 2025. You can find it and all episodes at Stitcher, iTunes, and wherever you get your podcasts, along with miaaw.net‘s other podcasts by Owen Kelly, Sophie Hope, and many guests, focusing on cultural democracy and related topics. You can also listen on Soundcloud and find links to accompany the podcasts.
The second issue of The Miaaw Review will be out soon. The first edition included an essay by me and shorter pieces by Owen Kelly and François Matarasso. You have to subscribe to receive it. It’s free, you won’t be spammed, nor will your email be shared with anyone. Just enter your email here.
François and I have talked quite a bit about cultural funding on previous podcasts. This time we talk to an actual funder! David Cutler is Director of the London-based Baring Foundation, and an old friend of François who served as a trustee of the foundation for nearly a decade. As François says in the podcast, Baring is a relatively small independent foundation that punches above its weight, giving about 5 million pounds per year, almost all of it matched by partners. It has programs in three areas: Arts, International Development, and Strengthening Civil Society.
David explained that “the unifying factor for the foundation is that everything that we do is about human rights, everything is about challenging discrimination and disadvantage. Everything is about how civil society can work to challenge that discrimination and disadvantage.”
Baring focuses on a theme in each of its program areas. When François was a trustee, it was arts and aging. He asked David to say something about what was achieving during the ten years of that initiative.
“What we certainly achieved was giving several hundred grants to many fantastically good arts organizations across an incredibly wide scope of art forms and across all of the UK, international exchange, chiefly through the British Council, and interacting with and engaging every sort of older person. Older people, of course, come in all shapes and sizes. So we were thinking about what it is to be an LGBT older person or an older person with learning disabilities or the challenges of rural isolation. We tried to be as inclusive as possible. We have four national arts councils, and we did a great deal of work with all of them that also leveraged a lot of funding, particularly in England, so that further amplified the number of examples of work.” Some of the arts councils were extremely supportive, although COVID was a major disruption to plans. As David pointed out, funding really does “get hit by big changes, and there’s been a hell of a lot of big changes. So I think people who are working in the arts are very realistic about that level of insecurity and level of of change that’s happening.”
The next focus was arts and mental health. I asked David how they chose that theme.
“We chose creative opportunities for people with mental health problems—it’s narrower than saying arts and mental health. We went through a process. One of the key questions that we always ask ourselves is given a small scale where can a quite modest amount of money, but over a fairly long period of time, at least 10 years, where is it likely to have some impact? There was a great deal of concern about people with mental health problems at the time that has only increased very, very substantially, I would assume, in other countries as well, but very definitely in the UK, particularly among younger people. We went through a process of analyzing a number of different options and feeling that that was one where, with patience, but with relatively small resources, some changes could be made.”
As with all its initiatives, Baring brings in advisors with specific expertise.
“It’s only become more important for us to engage with people who have got lived experience of whatever area that we’re talking about. And we don’t only take advice from people who are appointed as formal advisers. We take advice from many, many people, and we commission events and and reports from many, many people.” For this theme, there are two advisors who both have “a track record of working in that field. It’s important that they both came from ethnic minority communities and a lot of their work has also been with ethnic minority communities, and you have a white director in me. So there is a conscious, quite deliberate approach of, let’s make sure we get advice from a broad selection of people. And that’s also true about our trustees as well as our advisors. And there’s concentric circles going out. It’s a bit too structural just to focus on advisors because we’re constantly taking advice from hundreds of arts organizations that we’re working with. That is the most significant form of advice that we get.”
We asked David to describe an exemplary project, and he chose Hospital Rooms.
“It was formed by a husband and wife team,” David told us. “One’s a curator, one’s visual artist, and they had the experience of visiting a friend who was experiencing very severe mental health problems, and was on a psychiatric ward. It struck them how how poor the environment is for someone in those situations. Poor for staff, which is very, very important too. The thing in the psychiatric hospital is that you may possibly have been denied your liberty. It may be against your will, so it’s even more important that that should be a a good environment. That started in 2017 and eight years later, they are now working with something like 50-plus artists, a number of whom are extremely famous worldwide, to go into psychiatric hospitals and co-create new environments in those hospitals both with patients and staff. Amazingly difficult, because all those organizations are under massive pressure. It’s incredibly hard to get any funding from any of them.
“I visited some. They are extraordinarily beautiful, but the process of how they’ve done it is, of course, every bit as important. They’ve been unique in my experience of having a partnership with a highly successful commercial gallery house that has generated income in a way that’s very, very unusual in the sort of work that we fund. Even more importantly, they’ve also then tried to scale things up by creating what they call digital art rooms. When they leave and they’re no longer interacting with patients about what can be done in the hospital, there’s now something like 60 video sessions, really fun, high quality, very, very good artists doing them, which those patients can access themselves. But the really key thing is that they’ve got free, high-quality art materials from a commercial organization, and they’ve been given in a very attractive box to every psychiatric ward in England.”
David went on to explain that the vast majority of organizations Baring has funded “are working in the community, and we’re specifically funding them to work with men. We felt that the everyone was talking about—for very good reason—how few artists of color, artists from the global majority, were working in a creative mental health field, and why that’s a problem, and we’ve done lots of funding to change that. But the vast majority of artists are women, and there’s quite an imbalance when it comes to community participation, with relatively few men involved. There’s a number of really interesting things in the UK about working with mums with postnatal depression or postnatal mental health problems, but we’re funding a couple of projects that are using music to work with dads. It’s a huge range across different art forms in the community.”
The Baring Foundation site has a lot of excellent resources, including a series of “creatively minded” publications. Here’s one about the work with men and mental health.
It was an interesting conversation. We focused on the useful distinction between projects that are explicitly designed as therapeutic interventions versus those understood as artistic experiences with all the freedom that entails. François talked about his own learning along those lines working years ago with people with learning disabilities: “We created an artistic experience that gave them the freedom to do and be what they wanted to do within that. It was unusual in their experience that somebody wasn’t trying to make them better, as it were, or bring about some therapeutic change.” The difference matters greatly. We talked about the common expectation that when people have the freedom to make art it will be about the challenges they face versus the evident reality that people choose their subjects regardless of their circumstances. David described funding this work “as a human right.”
We also discussed the Baring Foundation’s work in the larger context, for example, how it relates to public sector policies such as something quite common in the UK, “social prescribing,” where any GP is authorized to prescribe arts activities or other experiences that enrich patients’ lives. Listeners based outside the UK will be interested to learn that public-private cooperation in this realm is not always as hard to find as in the U.S.
Please tune in to hear the whole episode.
I really like this Playing for Change international version of Jackson Browne’s “Doctor My Eyes.”