Boosting Resilience programme launches Birmingham September 2017

Residential 1: Understanding Your Assets

Boosting resilience, our intense, boundary-pushing and catalytic two-year Executive Learning programme, funded by Arts Council England, seeks to deliver excellence for the creative sectors. Central to the Boosting Resilience Programme are three intense two day residentials. In September, 27 participants undertook the first two day residential of the programme in Birmingham. This diverse set of participants, from from a variety of arts and cultural organisations across England, came together in an initial meeting of strangers to build a community, developing new networks, while they were encouraged to develop capacity for reflection as part of their everyday work.

Aki Schilz, Director, The Literary Consultancy stated: “The course allowed me to begin to think about ways we might articulate our creative assets, protecting our artistic integrity but introducing a more business-led approach that shows we are able to deliver strong leadership; both on a personal level from me to my team at TLC, and also outward from our reputation within the literature sector”.

Residential one established the foundational knowledge and learning approaches for the rest of the programme; to enable executive and board level staff working in arts and cultural organisations to develop new approaches to building resilience through identifying and capturing the value of creative assets and intellectual property.

Kevin Rivett, Director, Calderdale Music Trust noted: “I feel challenged, Illuminated and inspired to seek new direction both inward and outward”.

Our innovative and forward thinking programme seeks to have diverse and wide sector implications.

Helen Charman, Director, Learning and Research at the Design Museum stated: “First of all, thank you for a fantastic residential last week. What a huge amount of work everyone put in. The cohort is delightful. Reflecting, it occurs to me that perhaps one of the reasons it all jelled so well was because participants applied very much with the health of their organisations at the forefront – so less about individuals than about the collective. I have already used a theory of change model in planning activity”.

In the action packed programme the participants undertook ten distinct activities over the two days. These activities enabled participants to work on themes to develop new ideas for making better use of their creative assets and intellectual property, and to build an understanding of how activities based on their organisation’s creative assets relate to its vision and core purpose. Four external speakers were invited to share their expertise; Patrick Towell (Golant Media) shared insights on creative assets, Andy Wilkins (Perspectiv) on VIEW assessment of your problem solving style, and Noam Shemtov and Nadia-Anne Ricketts on intellectual property.

Caroline Coates, Production Director and Chair, Helen Storey Foundation said: “I was very impressed by the openness and kindness of the other delegates, and the range of their expertise. This for me and the team’s wonderful attention to detail was rather moving. I cannot fault the team or the thought and detail”.

Both participants and organisers were encouraged to Tweet and this accumulated body of tweets is accessible via Storify at: https://storify.com/bunhill/boosting-resilience-residential-1

As we continue to develop the programme do keep a look out for our offering and what we will roll out in the future.