Inch Wide Mile Deep - Recalibrating the emphasis of our Eco-Systems with Caro Howell
Caro Howell is the Director of the The Foundling Museum and Co-Chair of Women Leaders in Museums Network. The Foundling Museum is a very particular place, with a story that goes back 250 years to 1739, and tells the story of how contemporary artists have always been agents for change in contemporary society. The museum was the first children's charity and simultaneously the first arts charity formed in the UK. The contemporary artists in the collection now include Michael Craig Martin ,Tracey Emin, David Shrigley. Caro previously was at the Whitechapel Gallery, Tate Modern and Tate. Her background is as a curator within learning. She has a particular interest in audiences and their access to culture.
The arts across all the disciplines, without changing their own creative compass, can galvanise society to think differently'
Because the Foundling Museum's emphasis is on young people at the margins, their work is driven by an 'Inch Wide Mile Deep’ approach, acknowledging that they can't be all things to all people and have to dive deep and not spread themselves too thin. Caro was clear that to affect a profound change in someones life you need time. The majority of their programmes run for a year, every week or other week. Thinking about and using art to transform the lives of very vulnerable marginalised children and young adults drives Caro’s work.
Of course the challenge of where we are now has been the rush to get online; however this is not really a solution for the Foundling Museum. They run training programmes for young adults who have grown up in care, living in hostels or half ways houses, and the families they work with on estates don't have digital access.
'The question for us is how do we keep supporting these communities? Six months out of a programme, us not engaging with a 16 year old has a big impact, and for a 3 or 4 year old it is a huge percentage of their life. With this background, the lack of connectivity for the communities we work with is a massive challenge.'
The three questions Caro is asking herself when we reopen as a society and a sector are:
Who will be our audiences?
How will they interact with us as organisations and people?
What will be the benefits of the new situation we find ourselves in?
She feels it's clear that it will be months and possibly a year of socially distancing. Audiences will be nervous about visiting in large groups, they won't be coming in coaches or sitting in large auditoriums. We will be dealing with reduced numbers and visitors won’t be travelling large distances, as the world contracts physically.
This shifting landscape has led her to re-think the way they work, looking to the local eco-system and connectivity with people who can use the organisation flexibly and can regulate their relationship with you. The opportunity is to develop different and deeper, more sustained relationships. She has had a few conversations where people have cautioned this approach saying ‘you must be careful not to be parochial’.
Caro pointed out that one of their local primary schools has 27 languages spoken in it,
We live in London and the world is at our front door, we have an incredible community of artists, an amazing network of commercial organisations and institutions. In this new socially contracted world we have an opportunity to think differently about the depth of engagement we have with communities of people who are physically closer to us, who could find our work enriching and transformative and in the same we can be enriched and transformed by this. The idea your doorstep is parochial is one that is based on laziness and ignorance. The warp and weft of your landscape are now the things to be mined and explored’.
The challenge for many arts organisations has always been the numbers game, from funders, DCMS, ACE, corporates, patrons - it's always 'how many people, how many children’.
She hopes we can move post lockdown to a situation where everyone rethinks the seduction of the number games, that there is a renewed emphasis instead on the quality of work and relationships we can build up and sustain.
The concern is that we could see a different form of the numbers game - based on digital clicks - as many of the communities that arts organisations work with don’t have access to the digital alternative.
'In this sense digital, is just a different form of disadvantage and marginalisation for vulnerable communities. I hope there is a desire to change and forge a different way of working that folds the margins into the centre’.
Caro advises that the time is ripe for collaborations as everything is being thrown up in the air, especially as we look at what happens between furlough schemes ending and when we can get back to business as usual.
“You can either be paralysed by fear or see it as a chance for radical change’.