Sir Nicholas Serota. Photo © Olivia Hemingway
first and third outcomes together by considering how the professional and voluntary sectors can work with each other to help shape stronger cultural provision in villages, towns and cities.” This allows for some complexity as does the potential for debate about the definition of the outcomes – (for a start, the strategy acknowledges that divid- ing creativity and culture might not be clean-cut) – but they give organisations something to measure their current and future missions against. On top of these outcomes are the strategies’ invest- ment principles: Ambition and quality; dynamism, inclusivity and relevance; environmental responsibility.
Prioritisation
The outcomes and principles don’t narrow the field, so how will ACE sup- port be prioritised? For Public Library services the advice is to start applying: “There’s a door, yes it’s competitive and its over-subscribed but we have been looking for opportunities to support good projects as they come forward,” Nick says. “We currently allocate £97 million a year for project grants of different kinds. Some of those are schemes that libraries would not be eligible for, but there is money available every year for libraries that are not necessarily National Portfolio Organisations (NPOs). It’s noticeable that both museums and libraries have been a little bit slower than the performing arts organisations to be applying for that money so I would want to be encour- aging libraries, especially over the next two years and building up their expe- rience and then eventually think about the possibility of applying to become a regularly-funded organisation.”
Converging missions
The question is whether public libraries fit ACE’s prioritisation system. Nick says ACE has taken the library mission on board: “Over the last decade libraries
March 2020
have developed these universal offers – Culture and Creativity; Health and Well- being; Information and Digital; Reading – taking forward those universal offers will be one of the aims of the strategy, not just thinking about cultural events in libraries. I think we are seeing it in a more holistic fashion, just as we see the arts playing a role in society that is more holistic.” There are also other reasons why ACE’s mission is likely to be more in-line with non-cultural organisations. “I think that’s partly to do with the fact that there are these pressing needs in society. For exam- ple we know that mental health issues are very much to the fore in a society where people are under great pressure and I think the arts and culture can play a part, but not alone. No two library services are
going to be identical and there will be places where the emphasis on health is incredibly important in terms of knit- ting society together but equally I think culture can play a part. I wouldn’t like to choose between health and wellbeing and culture and creativity, those are two sides of the same coin really.”
Delivery
Although the delivery plan is not finalised, Nick gave an idea of how it will prioritise libraries: “In the next few years there are a number of different ways in which we will begin to implement the strategy against those three outcomes. Against the cultural communities outcome libraries will be one of four priorities. Schemati- cally that is how it sits at the moment, but
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