2020 News: Arts Council Elevate Award & the Reality
I’m pleased to announce we have been named one of the 45 nationwide recipients of Arts Council England’s Elevate Award, granting us just over £93,000. It’s an honour to receive the award alongside so many of the organisations we admire: Bernie Grant Arts Centre, Selina Thompson, humanhood, Chineke and gal-dem, to name a few. This is very exciting news and it comes at a crucial time in our work.
As many of you will know, we recently began the fundraising process for ABUELOS, the artist-led hotel. Alongside this, we’ve been planning an anti-gentrification community housing project - we’ll be embedding some of this concept into our first space, Yard this spring. Alongside a full programme rolling out in each of these spaces as well as in partner spaces both nationally and internationally, there is much to do. Granted, ABUELOS and Yard will be the first designated spaces where we can roll out our work the way we’ve wanted to in a sustainable, regenerative way.
I want to be super clear - while £93,000 is a chunky bit of cash, it is a skim off the top of what is necessary to make this ambitious work a reality, particularly when going up against naysayers, stolen IP, racialised risk and the nepotism our industries thrive upon. ABUELOS alone is a £5m project. Arts Council’s support is a positive step in the right direction, but we have a long way to go and we’re not naive to the challenges of the road ahead. All the while, we’re competing for property in a rapidly gentrifying city at the pace of the private sector, where money slips between hands and balance sheets quicker than you can imagine.
For context, this grant was solely for the purpose of supporting the resilience of our organisation, rather than our programming and community activity. We decided it was necessary to invest this fund into building the capacity of our organisation - putting staff on actual PAYE (pew pew pew pewwww), strengthening our governance and community accountability and getting airtight with the business essentials needed to prepare for this next phase of work.
Here’s why this is important - we know precarity in the arts is very, very real and it disproportionately affects people like us. Our team is made up of Black, brown and migrant cultural workers and that’s before we get to the network of freelancers we regularly work with, who flit between their own creative practice and whatever else helps them make ends meet. We simply cannot realise the scale of our work without investing in people, many of whom have been exploited by our industries for their cultural and social capital with little value shared in return. It is necessary to move forward as an organisation centred on healthy working practices, where the financial emotional and wellbeing stability of our team is paramount; where the agency and respect of individuals is honoured and reciprocated; where we are granted the space to be ourselves freely with the liberty to experiment, take risks and challenge ourselves. All of this and the energy it creates will lend itself to the dope work we’re about to build.
MAIA is 7 years old this year. I have no doubt 2020 will come with all of its challenges but we’re also on the cusp of our a new millennia’s 20’s Renaissance. It will hopefully be a celebratory time, where many of us will be emboldened by radical hope and pragmatism, where many will find new ways of organising around blockers and where collectivism must become the default. We’re excited to lean further into our values, doing the best work we can and continuing to be intentional about all of our choices. I'm gassed for you to meet the new team (they’re all so dope), to build our Boards and to crack on with this work alongside you all. We’ll keep you updated with next steps, but in the meantime, thank you for your continued support, love, care and allyship. We move!
- Amahra Spence
Squad! Image: Thom Bartley