GREAT NEWS! Drake Music and Furtherfield have been awarded a grant from Arts Council England to further develop the WeShare joint initiative.
Introduction
Drake Music and Furtherfield have come together to create ‘We Share’, a new initiative, building on and developing the combined creative assets, specialisms and strengths of these two organisations and collaborating closely with other groups in the field. In the first phase of this initiative our organisations are testing and piloting new ways of working, with a view to other partners joining us during the second phase.
Together we are exploring the possible benefits of organisational collaboration in:
● Operations: to share infrastructure (administrative, technical, buildings), knowledge and networks to reduce costs and improve processes.
● Organisational development: share personnel (fund-raising and business development) to identify potential opportunities and areas for joint organisational innovation; to develop the membership of We Share.
● Artistic Programme: to benefit from extended networks of skills & experience, to cross-pollinate communities of practice, to engage more beneficiaries with better work and to stimulate debate, collaboration and extraordinary work.
● Services/ Business Development: To develop services built on the core skills and experience of our organisations. These disseminate We Share values, build skills-base within the organisations and generate income. To identify and create new business, generating earTo identify and develop social enterprises that promote the organisations’ values. ned income to support our core offer. a series of projects in
Pilot 1: Shared Web Infrastructure
The first of these projects has been to develop shared web infrastructure and organisational websites for participatory arts organisations using Free and Open Source Software and processes. The next stage of this project is to develop a business plan and seek investment to broaden the reach of our offer.
“Our partnership with Drake Music is incredibly inspiring and going from strength to strength. ‘Connecting across Difference’ – our first joint commission in 2008 – was a real success and paved the way for several other collaborative initiatives such as web infrastructure development and sharing of staff and resources across both our organisations. Furtherfield and Drake Music each have their own very distinct identities yet we complement, challenge and support each other. The next few years will see the development of many new initiatives and the launch of ‘We Share’.” Ruth Catlow, Artistic Director | Furtherfield
