Annual Report 20041

CULTURAL DEVELOPMENT NETWORK INC.

The Cultural Development Network is a small not for profit association generating new ideas and new connections for councils, communities and cultures. We work towards a society in which local communities, in all their diversity, have the resources and support they need to make and express their own culture. We advocate a stronger role for local government in nurturing cultural vitality and see the arts (at the heart of culture) as central to this vision. Visit our website:

Director: Judy Spokes

Ph: 03 9658 9950

Manager: Kim Dunphy

Ph: 03 9658 9976

C/O City of Melbourne

GPO Box 1603

Melbourne 3000

Cultural Development Network gratefully acknowledges the support of:

Cover photo credit: ‘Here Spray’: The Stencil Project exhibition,

Presented by City of Melbourne’s Community Cultural Development Program

as part of the Fourth Pillar Conference, November 2004

Photographer: Louis Porter

CONTENTS

page

Chair’s report 4

Director’s Report5

Manager’s Report 11

Reports:

Cultural Sustainability and Community Vitality: Pilot project 12

Fourth Pillar Conference 15

Forums 18

Treasurer's Report19

Financial statements

Statement of financial performance20

Statement of financial position22

Statement of significant accounting policies23

Statement of cash flows24

Public Officer’s statement26

Auditor’s report27

Cultural Development Network Board28

Cultural Development Network Staff29

CHAIR’S REPORT

In Sue Beal’s absence it falls to me as Deputy Chair to reflect on behalf of the Board on the work of the Cultural Development Network during 2004. I find the task a happy one, especially when I consider how much has been achieved by an organisation that is still quite young and certainly still quite lean in terms of resources.

This year we took a big step in employing a second staff member – that represents a 100 percent increase in our human resources as Judy Spokes has been the sole staff member since our inception in 2000/01. The Board achieved a long-held objective this year when we employed Kim Dunphy in the new role of Manager, supporting Judy as Director. Kim’s background in community arts, arts administration and local government cultural programs equip her ideally for this role. Kim joined us at a very busy time only six weeks out from our Fourth Pillar national conference and did an excellent job taking over the reins in this major undertaking. Details of the conference are provided elsewhere in this report.

Another highlight for 2004 was our successful application to the Australia Council and VicHealth for funding of the feasibility stage of a national local government pilot program we conceived with our partners, the Local Government Community Services Association of Australia and the Globalism Institute at RMIT. The program, Community Sustainability and Cultural Vitality, aims to invest in and analyse the effectiveness of artist-led civic engagement projects over a three year period in which complex local problems will be explored by six different communities, led by their Councils. By the end of the year we had secured positive indications of funding and other support from various government and community agencies. A detailed program and budget for the next stage of the project will be developed by mid 2005. We are indebted to Anne Dunn who has worked as a consultant with Judy Spokes in scoping and advocating this ambitious program. Australia Council support also has been critical.

There are many other events and activities that the Cultural Development Network has initiated or partnered with the myriad individuals and agencies whose support we depend upon. These are covered within this report. We value this work as central to our promotion of new relationships across disciplines and spheres of government (and community) through facilitating a deepening critical discourse about community cultural development practice and ideas.

Finally, I must refer to the Network’s role in supporting a cohesive response to the proposed restructure of the Australia Council announced in December 2004. We are continuing to work with other agencies and individuals in Victoria and elsewhere to encourage the Australia Council to sustain its long-term commitment and support for community cultural development.

I thank my fellow Board members and staff for their energy, generosity and vision as we continue to chart new territory for integrated community and arts development at the local level. Our inimitable Chair, Sue Beal continues to challenge us and enlarge our vision. I salute her for her leadership and ceaseless good humour.

Malcolm McKinnon,

Deputy Chair
DIRECTOR’S REPORT

We packed a lot into 2004 and managed to achieve more than expected by a tiny outfit like ours, by working (almost always) in partnership with others. It’s both more efficient and more rewarding doing things together with those who share our values and goals. While the practical efficiencies of partnership are important to us, (especially as we ran a one-staff operation for most of the year), more vital is the inherent value of partnerships to our purposes.

BUILDING RELATIONSHIPS ACROSS BOUNDARIES

It is essentially through collaborative undertakings with external agencies that we seek to build creative relationships across boundaries (of sectors, disciplines and hierarchies) in public life. We seek to influence others within and beyond the arts, to achieve our principal goal of elevating the role of culture in public policy, and more specifically, affirming the value of community-based arts as a central driver of community sustainability.

Stretching across levels and departments of government, and across diverse community, arts and academic sectors these relationships increasingly knit together a fabric of progressive public policy (informed by creative community practice) that is so vital to achieving the elusive holy grail of sustainability – surely the only legitimate goal of any public policy or program these days. In this I refer of course to the four pillared version of sustainability (economic viability, social equity, environmental responsibility and cultural vitality) which continues to underpin our work.

THANKS TO OUR PARTNERS

At this point I would like to acknowledge our key partners (not including our sponsors) that have worked with us this year: the Victorian Local Governance Association (VLGA); the Arts Industry Council; the North Richmond Community Health Centre; Neighbourhood Renewal Unit (DHS); Department of Victorian Communities; Community Music Victoria; Common Ground; RMIT Globalism Institute; the Local Government Community Services Association of Australia; the Community and Social Planners Network; the City of Melbourne; the City of Port Phillip; the City of Maribyrnong; the City of Greater Geelong; the Rural Shire of Wangaratta; the Latrobe City; Dalrymple Shire, Auspicious Arts Projects and John Paxinos and Associates, Kitka Hitulka, and Jon Hawkes. There are too many individuals to thank, but you know who you are. Thanks for everything.

STARTING WITH A BIG VISION

I began 2004 energised by a commitment to a fresh five year vision for the organisation, created through an intensive two day residential planning workshop with the Board facilitated by Anne Dunn just before Christmas. This exercise stretched out our ambitions to just beyond the realistic; we committed ourselves then to working ‘beyond our comfort zone’ – a most creative if unsettling place at times. We also agreed to make national and global connections with others relating to our ‘councils, cultures, communities’ reform agenda. We affirmed our view of arts ‘at the heart of culture’ and, through community cultural development practice, their central place in engaging and sustaining communities. In exploring the broad scope of our role into the longer term we endorsed a broad framework of objectives:

  • A rich, diverse and accessible intellectual life
  • Entrenching community cultural development through mutual recognition of all sectors’ contribution to it, through collaborative approaches, complementary skills, and resources and building shared objectives,
  • Widespread support of the quadruple bottom line planning model
  • Exploration of new ideas and connections by investing in new models of practice to demonstrate its benefits
  • Encourage understanding of a sense of the global connections of the work and achievements

These visions triggered a review our annual program plan and have become the building blocks of our second triennial business plan (2006 – 2008) which will be finalised in June 2005. I mention this here to remind members and partners that you are invited to contribute to this planning exercise. We are very keen to hear your ideas and proposals for future activities.

A QUICK TOUR OF OUR MAIN ACTIVITIES IN 2004

Cultural Vitality supplement in Overland journal

The 50th anniversary edition of Overland journal, published in March carried a special supplement on Cultural Vitality that we commissioned with the City of Port Phillip. The 32 page supplement explored the cultural dimension to contemporary public life and covered topics as diverse as:

  • Local democracy
  • Citizenship
  • Arts and popular culture
  • Public space
  • Cultural diversity

The papers in the supplement developed ideas presented at the national ‘Beyond Cultural Policy’ symposium which we co-hosted with the City of Port Phillip in July 2003. The Overland supplement and our wide distribution of that special edition of the journal continued our commitment to stimulating discourse in public policy and local government about culture as the fourth pillar of sustainability. We still have free copies available to new members.

Community Cultural Development Organisations National Roundtable

Also in March we participated in a national roundtable in Adelaide convened by the Australia Council that brought together all the community cultural development (ccd) organisations it supports through recurrent funding. Discussion focussed on the role these organisations seek to play in supporting ccd practice in their own regions or constituencies and it addressed the future needs of the sector in the longer term. It was fascinating to see the diversity (of visions and roles) within this group and both challenging and inspiring to debate practice, theory, and tactics issues with colleagues from around the country.

With the benefit of hindsight this meeting probably signalled the beginning of what emerged at the very end of 2004 as the most significant (and controversial) shake-up of support for ccd sector by the Australia Council in its history. Given that an Australia Council review of the ccd field (and of these organisations) is expected soon after July 2005, it will be important for the connections made and discussions begun in Adelaide at the roundtable to continue and to become more focussed. For our part in this ongoing dialogue we will focus on our main strength and key priority: better engagement of local government in community cultural development. Reflecting on the March roundtable session, it is probably our local government priority, more than anything else that defines our distinctiveness, our unique role in the ccd field. Not an art-making organisation, nor a professional association, we realised in March that, positioned right on the cusp of the arts and local government sectors, with the sustainability of communities as our purpose, we are essentially a ginger group.

Forums program delivers on our networking and discourse and debate goals

Our forums, both large and small are the main expressions of our work in bringing people together and promoting better practice through more inclusive and deeper discourse among artists, cultural practitioners, councils and communities. The 2004 forum program is summarised elsewhere in this report. Here then are my reflections on some of these events and their highlights:

Culturally Speaking @ Wangaratta Playhouse Theatre (February)

We were pleased to participate with the Rural Shire of Wangaratta in February at a forum to examine the links between community aspirations and the arts. This provided another opportunity for Jon Hawkes, author of our book, The Fourth Pillar of Sustainability; Culture’s Essential Role in Public Planning and myself to stimulate a more fertile environment for participatory arts and integrated cultural planning in the context of a Council’s review of its role in arts development. Forums and discussions held in partnership with individual Councils is an area we would like to develop in future.

Let’s Get Creative: Leveraging Creativity for Economic and Social Growth (March)

This was a small think tank exploring UK, USA and Australian efforts in linking creative communities to economic and social development. We are grateful to Larry Quick, a specialist in creative approaches to corporate strategy and economic and social development, for his support in producing this event.Larry had been a consultant to the Western Australian Government in formulating a ‘Creative Communities’ policy, and presented this work and related ideas addressing:

  • Why is creativity critical to economic and social growth?
  • Creative Communities: what are they, what do they look to achieve?
  • The growth in creative community development - USA, UK & Australia
  • Clustering and creative communities

Michelle Bauer, President, Creative Tampa Bay (Florida, USA) and Peter Kageyama, Director, () made a valuable contribution to discussion sharing their experience and challenges in community and business-led cultural revitalisation in their home town. It was interesting to hear their response to local Australian examples as being further

Cooking Cultures Communities Forum @ Immigration Museum (April)

This April 5th forum featured artists and participants from two community arts projects that explored the ways that food builds connections between people. ‘Eating the City’ was a large scale community-based public art project, commissioned by the City of Melbourne that transformed the banks of the Yarra one Saturday in April with the construction and destruction of a huge edible city. Created by 20 community groups over several weeks and involving 350 participants, mostly older people, and recently arrived immigrants, asylum seekers or refugees, the project was a collaboration between a visionary council, local and international artists and a notable Australian chef that sees herself as a cultural worker. Gay Bilson, the creative chef described it like this to our forum audience the day after the event:

“So this collaboration between an artist, and food, and ‘ordinary’ (that is, remarkable, generous, and proud women), is also something we find it hard to come to grips with in Australia and in the world of the arts, what ever the arts might be. But during the event, and afterwards, you could feel something shifting, you could sense that the crowd saw what they could not grasp beforehand: that there really might be a collaboration which involves an artist and domestic cooks and a person who initiates the original conversation with the cooks (a pivotal part of the project) and a city council to fund it, and a culinary cheer-leader (that’s me, the city’s ‘food engineer’!) and that the sum of the parts will be greater than the artist’s imagination and exciting and even uplifting for the women who became involved because they trusted the project (trust is, I believe, the central relationship here). You could sense wonderment. “ – Gay Bilson

Also presented by artists and participants, was ‘Cooking Stories’ acommunity arts project documenting stories of a group of refugees making connections with each other through their sharing of recipes, and meals, facilitated and documented by artist, Julie Shiels. An exhibition of the project was on display at the Immigration Museum at the time before travelling to the Footscray Community Arts Centre Gallery.

Culture, Sustainability and the Triple Bottom Line (May)

Building an ecologically sustainable future and balancing complex economic and social imperatives is arguably the key challenge for Councils in the 21st century. Better integration across local government’s many functions and services towards sustainability objectives is one response. Another is a need to more effectively engage citizens, communities and enterprises in meeting the sustainability challenge. The place of ‘cultural vitality’ in the journey towards sustainability was the focus of this forum in May designed for local government professionals across all disciplines from the physical to the social and cultural realms. Local government policy makers, environmentalists, designers, artists, and community interest groups participated in a vibrant exchange at the Melbourne Town Hall stimulated by films, community arts project case studies and tricky questions.

Growing Resilience: Sowing Seeds of Hope and Empowerment (August)

The Growing Resilience Conference was a collaboration between CASPN (supported by the VLGA), the Hume City Council and the Cultural Development Network. CASPN is a professional interest group of local government staff with a responsibility for community and social planning and development. Our role as co-host was to ensure the program at the Global Learning Centre in Broadmeadows included a focus on arts-based community development strategies.

Feedback from delegates at the Global Learning Centre in Broadmeadows, was encouraging for us as the cultural development speakers and the creative presentation by Graham Pitts and the ‘Voices of the Atherton Gardens’ choir attracted most interest:

“I felt very much humbled by the Atherton Gardens choir. Please pass on thanks for sharing their culture - a memorable experience”.

“Practical - great to see the ARTS finally getting the profile it deserves”

– (extracts from delegate feedback forms).

‘The Art of Engagement:arts, culture andsocial capital' (December)

Developed in partnership with the Department for Victorian Communities and targeted at policy and program staff across the Victorian public service the forum aimed to spotlight the role of community cultural development in engaging and strengthening communities. The Torch project which, through the arts, has ignited the imaginations of many of Victorian towns and neighbourhoods was one case study presented, along with our own Small Towns Big Picture project. Another positive aspect was an address by Greg Andrews, Deputy Director, Arts Victoria, linking the Government’s Creative Capacity + arts policy to the Government’s overall efforts to engage and strengthen communities.