Clare Cooper, co-founder and co-director, Mission Models Money (MMM)

Clare Cooper

Will the strategy have a ‘real effect’ in boosting philanthropy? If that means, say, a 30% increase in philanthropic giving outside of the big national institutions during the life time of this parliament and in the context of the current global financial crisis, I’d say “no”.

Considering where we are at this point and given the challenges the professional arts and cultural sector is facing, I’d rather see government and its agencies focus on a long-term national capitalisation strategy for the sector (of which endowments are only part) as proposed by MMM’s newly-published Capital Matters report.

We need to evolve a more systemic view of how we fund and finance creative practice. The coalition government has chosen to focus on philanthropy (and, it seems, elite philanthropy at that), which is only one part of the income spectrum that professional arts and cultural organisations could get better at tapping into.

We need the same level of attention to and incentivising of new ideas and new behaviours (including from donors, funders and investors) across the whole of the income spectrum from philanthropic, grant funding, alternative financial instruments such as revenue sharing arrangements (quasi-equity), underwriting or loans which MMM has been looking into for the last five years and which is currently the subject of our Capital Matters research, the structured market and the open market.

They are all connected, the energies around each part of that spectrum feed off and feed into each other and mindsets and skillsets need help evolving across the board.

Clare Cooper
Clare Cooper is co-founder and co-director of the Mission Models Money (MMM) programme.
Her career in arts management began with the British Council in 1981. From 1991 to 2001 she specialised in partnership development and fundraising then joining Arts & Business as Director of Development, then becoming their first director of Policy & Communications. There, in partnership with Roanne Dods of the Jerwood Charitable Foundation, she initiated the MMM programme, leaving in 2005 to focus full-time on its independent development. Cooper has served as a trustee on the boards of a number of arts organisations and higher education institutions over the last 15 years but is now focusing her volunteering around the role of cultural and creative practice in building awareness of and responses to resource scarcity and climate change.

Mission Models Money
Email: clare.cooper@deft.org.uk
Website: www.missionmodelsmoney.org.uk