A cultural return on investment

Two things prompted me to think about this.  Firstly, two years of working intensively with SROI – and many previous years evaluating cultural projects, has made me fairly certain that creative and cultural projects always offer something over and above what other projects do.  Over and above the different elements of social, economic and environmental return highlighted in SROI.  For a while, I thought it might be that we need to capture a fourth line, personal return. 

Then I facilitated a discussion by museums to inform the Arts Council’s new responsibility to look after them too.  Gordon Watson, from Lakeland Arts Trust, commented that what museums do is make social, environmental, economic and cultural benefit.  Which in a sense is my answer.  The job now is to distinguish what that bit of cultural benefit is, that is distinct from social benefit.  At the Happy Museum symposium yesterday I asked the participants what they thought – a brilliant bunch from six museums across the country.  These are my suggested three USPs if you like, coming out of that discussion.  They are about things that we do that are either or both ‘creative’ and ‘cultural’ – make of that what you will!

Being part of creative or cultural experiences helps you practise looking at things differently –  for you personally, that makes life exciting!  (Steve Gardam from LTM described walking down a street in London with some new knowledge about a historic figure who lived there, and how that changed things for him).  For society it enables lateral solutions which tend to be better.  For both individuals and society, the practising helps us to be more resilient.  (I credit Steve with this one)

The cultural world is our collective dreaming.  It’s the place where society sifts, sorts, shares and processes ‘stuff’ in a freeform, not goal focused way.  Dreaming has an important psychological role in individuals – the same is true for society.  (I credit Kim Pickin from the Story Museum with this one)

And at a highly instrumental level, creative and cultural experiences work for people because they allow people to bespoke them to meet their own needs - football doesn’t do that.  And at a more intrinsic level they exercise the soul, playing the role that school does for the brain, and sports does for the body.  (I credit Katherine Ford of the Cinema Museum with that one)

How this translates into a tangible way to plan, do and review creative and cultural delivery, I’m not sure.  But I think its an important step in my thinking at least. 

Well-being – the most important social return and our challenge for 2012

As a business we have two main areas of work; helping clients to see the wood for the trees – analytical, diagnostic work – and supporting a focus on the positive.   The latter first became a feature for us when we worked with Bernie Brown on young people’s services at Knowsley MBC outside Liverpool.  She was keen to instigate Family Group Conferencing at the time for extended families to find their own solutions to their young people’s ills.  She brought Mike Doolan over from New Zealand, the head of social care who had been inspired by working with Maori families to refocus on ‘kinship care’.  The result there was the Government were quite quickly able to close down children’s homes because – surprise surprise – extended families are so much better able to look after their children than the state (and in these cases their parents).

That was about four years ago, and now there is a movement in this country which we notice shares some of the features of this approach, sometimes called ‘co-production’.  We’ve seen it particularly through the work of the new economics foundation (nef) whom we follow closely, but also in the form of Asset Based Community Building which John Ashton, the head of public health in Cumbria showed us.  In our work with Children and Young People focusing on the positive is about looking at positive psychology.  Whilst it sounds like obvious good sense, it’s quite a challenge when services for young people are all about stopping them doing things – less pregnancy, fewer drugs, less anti-social behaviour. 

But the challenge for us now is linking up these two areas of our business I mentioned – the diagnostic work – which mostly takes the form of Social Return On Investment (SROI) analyses – and focusing on well-being and the positive – which we believe is not only the best way to help people to find their own successful path through life but is also the most important social return.

SROI practitioners tend to see well-being as a means to an end – a personal resource which helps with success in work or social environments.  And there are challenges with measuring it.  Jayne Stallard Moore, our Ed Psych associate, says happiness is like an illegal substance – once you get used to it, you need more!  It’s also an area where there is a high risk of politicians or public services trying to impose a socially acceptable norm.   

And yet Government has tasked the ONS with measuring well-being to offer an alternative to GDP, and Gus O’Donnell, outgoing Cabinet Secretary, has described how the results of the research will go on to influence policy in all areas (have a listen at http://tinyurl.com/76zeo5e ). Nef (again) have published a couple of great documents too, their Sustainable well-being: guide to policy and practice and Measuring our Progress.

So the challenge as I see it is how to link these two worlds.  It comes back to something that we see all the time in our consultancy practice – it’s all very well being able to see the wood for the trees, but how do you then nurture your wood?  The research, the good practice, even the policy is out there – but how do you put it into practice widely, fairly and consistently? 

It’s in this particular forest that we will spend 2012 – seeing how we can make sure that well-being is understood effectively as a social impact, and that the people we work with know how to support their clients or customers to make it happen.  No doubt there will be a bit of ‘nudging’ in there too, as behavioural economics influences our work.    I’m now involved in a couple of areas where I hope we can influence this at a policy level as well as through our own work: as a member of the newly formed SROI UK Council, and on the steering group for the Department for Education’s evaluation of the huge Myplace fund.  We’ll let you know how it goes!