What do you think are the main barriers for working class people getting better representation in the arts?
First of all, pay is a big one. We all know about the glass ceiling for women and marginalised people. It also exists for working class people, who earn less on average for comparable positions. There's also a glass floor as well in the arts. There are people with privilege that take jobs that do not pay living wages because they're in a position to do so without risk, and that suppresses or stymies the development of more progressive, inclusive, and fairer wage and contract situations across all the sectors.
Aside from that, I think housing. [There’s a] concentration of reliable work in this space around major cities – London disproportionately, obviously, but also Manchester. If you're not near, you need the means to be able to move into that space. There's a real issue around geography that intersects with pay and conditions.
The final issue specific to the arts, I would say, is a closed network of access to information and opportunities. Even if you're a big organisation, every penny does count in this climate and that does mean there can be an over-reliance on personal networks, on fitting with an organisation, on having a track record in a space. This means people don't take chances on new folks. A lot of jobs are fulfilled through word of mouth and private networks. Not every job ends up on a job site
In the time that you've been doing the work that you do, have you noticed any changes in working class representation, either for the better or for the worse?
It has fluctuated. I feel really proud that Arts Emergency were straight out the traps. My co-founder and I organised this as soon as we saw the Browne Report come in, recommending a tripling of tuition fees. I'm really proud that we created space and I've watched that space get filled by amazing organisations that are more focused. We're very intersectional. But everything from like gal-dem magazine coming up to a plethora of mentoring projects that are career-specific in this space, a lot of endeavours to ensure that people are given opportunities to be represented in this space. There's a greater understanding of intersectionality when you're talking about access and justice. So I think there are a lot of positive things.
But equally, George Floyd and 2020 led to an outpouring from cultural organisations with huge voices, and didn't lead to any systemic change. Redundancies came at that time and it was frontline staff on casual contracts that took the hit. There are more all-white advertising leadership teams than there were before the pandemic at this moment in time. One in 10 of the three million or so people getting paid securely to work in culture are from a working class background. So it's way out of whack. There are indications that we're moving in the right direction, but anyone talking about feeling like we're in a better place is wrong because actually the wider social context is harsher than ever.
I feel proud of what Arts Emergency has done. It's been wonderful seeing this space fill up with more effort. It's talked about more and it's kind of quantified more as an issue. But systemically, nothing's changed. So, to put a positive spin on it, maybe in the next phase we will see this start to come through.
Neil Griffiths is the co-founder and CEO of Arts Emergency
(Credit: Vanessa Ng)
For culture to do those things that it certainly can do, everyone needs to be involved, right? You need authentic working class voices and from other under-represented communities as well. Everyone needs to take part in order for culture to do the things that we want it to do.
100%. I never get asked about colonialism and decolonolisation and the role that we have to play in that, yet it's a key struggle for Arts Emergency to unpick the legacy of the most horrific, historic stuff. We lose so many stories, so much information, so much experience every year. It’s just the lack of funding to be able to take on people to go on their journey with us, let alone what's happening with university applications from people from less well-off backgrounds, let alone what's happening with the global diaspora and everything that's been lost over the years. It's just mind-boggling and culture becomes this small thing.
I'm sitting here as part of a movement of nearly 10,000 people set up to support young people to be their best, most aspirational selves, and to get practical ways in and ways of sustaining. But equally, I could tell you what a struggle it's been to make this thing happen and to keep this thing going. We're a grassroots community group that happens to be national, but it's so hard. We're absolutely supported by the absolute minority of people in the creative and cultural industries, from policy makers and gatekeepers through to people just on salary and in jobs.
As beautiful as it is that we're a people's movement, it's notable to me – and maybe I'm cynical because I've been doing it for so long – how small a percentage of those people support us with money and time, not just words. Actual, practical support is hard to get. I suppose I'm saying: why has it been so little, especially in the times we've been through? Why has it been such a pet cause for individuals?
My job is always to say it's not fine until everyone gets a chance to contribute, and everyone gets fairly treated, and everyone's safe in this space. To be an artist, you have to share a bit of yourself and put a bit of skin in the game. To do that as the only person from your background in a room is a-high risk activity in a world that is so rarefied. These spaces have to become inclusive in a genuine sense, and it cannot be led by the people that own these spaces already. They're part of the journey, but they can't continue to be the ones that decide what to allocate and who to fund and how to do it. I think it needs to be a collective effort.
Let's jump into that, then. What are the specific ways in which Arts Emergency’s work helps to kind of address the problems we're bringing up for working class people in the arts?
We work very, very personally. So we literally meet someone at 16 and talk about their interests, passions – not about what they want to do career-wise – and we talk about their challenges and their hopes. We match them with the most appropriate person we've got, and we're lucky to be so blessed with a lot of volunteers. It's a very bespoke program and, in this policy landscape that we're in, if you're at a state school, low-income or on free school meals, you're not getting much bespoke attention from the world. So that's incredibly valuable as a validation.
We also do that over a long period of time. So you join us at 16, and right now you can be on the project for another 10 years at that point. We are a consistent thread for you as a community and resource through university or next steps, post-education into your early career and hopefully into your mid-career. That is a deliberate way of recreating the kind of social and cultural capital that people who are born into that world have. It's something that if you're born with that or you have access to that, you don't really see it or value it, and if you're not born with it, you don't know you need it until you see it.
That individual work now happens at scale, so the next phase for us is really leaning into the community that we have here. We do individual work very well, but we've also got nearly 2,000 young people in the community at different stages of their journey who we are bringing closer together. Connecting people to other people pushing in the same direction with the same interests is so important. Change does not happen without organisation. Government doesn't change and business doesn't change unless there's organisation to lead that change. We know that this generation is so invested in change, so much more articulate about the challenges and the injustices that we need to fix as a society. It just doesn't exist anywhere right now, that collective voice for people trying to get into industry at that stage of their life. We’re starting that work now.
We've touched on this a little bit with our conversations about funding earlier, but what are the biggest challenges that you guys are facing now as an organisation?
The cohorts of teenagers we're bringing on board into the mentoring program right now have been through a pandemic. They've been through a global economic crash. It’s quite unprecedented, the situation they find themselves in, and culture is a shrinking platform. The biggest challenge we've got is supporting the complex needs of these young people who have got so much challenge, so much less time and energy to give towards their best, most aspirational self, as opposed to just surviving, just having some kind of plan for the future whilst dealing with the fear and worry. Carving out that space for people and making that meaningful and useful and not just an experiential short term thing is a massive operational challenge, because it involves trust and consistency. And in this climate, for a small charity, those are very hard things to preserve because of the pressures we face.
Bringing it organisationally, and everyone's gonna say this, it's funding. I know charities in our space that have not raised any money for months. We're a strong operation, so we're lucky. What I will say is we've had to pivot really hard into new income streams over the last 18 months or so because the bread and butter grassroots support I built this on – £5 and £10 monthly donations or £1,000 yearly pledges towards places on the project – has gone. The people in these industries that are suffering from bad working practices just haven't been working. There's been nothing there. There's been no income. So our base has been hit so hard.
We've never seen such a drop-off in individual support. And that's hard because that support isn't just about what we can spend. It was a moral statement of intent as well. It was the people who recognised the problems funding a practical solution to the problem. It's been rocky seeing our base drop off in such a significant way that hasn't happened in a decade.
My final challenge is the ethical tension of knowingly creating a way into this world whilst being fully cognisant of the injustice, inequity, and the strain it can put on you to be in it. I would just say that you’ve got to trust people if they want to do it. Give them all the information honestly and all the tools you can. That's the other challenge: it is hard because you care. You do it because quite often you're someone that has been affected by the issues you're working on. There's plenty of challenges, but you do it because it's beautiful.
Neil Griffiths says the future is bright for Arts Emergency
(Credit: Rob Greig)
On that note, what is the future looking like for you guys?
It's wonderful. We have a “good news” Slack channel and, every day, there's something wonderful happening for someone or someone's had a breakthrough. It's just doing exactly what we wanted. We want this to churn out good vibes and happy people and empower people, so we're doing that. In terms of the future, we're just doing more of that, and we're getting better at it all the time. We're looking at expanding our mentoring projects – not only are we going deeper in the North West by combining the work across Merseyside and Greater Manchester, but we're expanding in London for the first time in about six years. We've got plans on the runway for a mentoring project in West Yorkshire.
So the next phase is how do we get funded and get these projects embedded in communities? But even more excitingly, I've mentioned the community development work that we're embarking on. We're starting our field trips and events program again for the first time since the pandemic this January. So we're gonna be bringing people together more often in physical space. We all hate networking, but just that connection – I call it stitching yourself into that world – is incredibly important.
Finally, the pièce de résistance for me is that we've been running some wonderful pilots around coaching for those that are over 18. We've done a lot around work experience and information over the years, but this is taking our mentoring practice and making it available to people that need it in a different way. So it's more careers-focused and more practice-focused, accessible at multiple times throughout the year. It's exactly what I wanted Arts Emergency to do. If you need support, if you're stuck, and you haven't got an auntie or uncle or friend to be emailing, this is what we're here for. Our network is a treasure trove.
It's just very satisfying. For all the challenges, all the dirge of unfairness and entrenched privilege, and all the stuff that tires me out working in this space, that's the counter – the generosity, the sharing, the connecting. It's such a salve to everything else. It's so important that people continue to do that because we all bring it home to our communities and our peers. Every time one of our people breaks through the glass ceiling and gets into culture or gets to university for the first time, it's like a tessellated pattern of good and they bring it to their community.
What advice would you give now to a young working class person who wants to get into the arts?
That's a tough one. Check if you're eligible to join Arts Emergency. Hopefully, we're in your area. And if we're not, look for a local project. Look for things you can do to connect with people around you. Go find other people online in your local area and just start that journey. If your question extends to the practicalities of getting in, I would say get all the information you can. Don't go in blind. Protect your innocence and naivety and optimism, because they are integral to being able to do this. The love you have for your practice or subject is the thing that will bring you to success in whatever form it takes. You might be looking at an author or a historian or a pop star or an actor and going “that's what I want to do”. That's gold dust, protect that. But in getting all the information around it, you might find a whole world of other things within that space. Every experience is valuable, every challenge is a chance to grow. I sound like a life coach, and I know it, but it's true.
Do sign up to the Arts Emergency newsletter as well because we share a lot of stuff that is going to connect you to all those other projects in this space. We do curate that and it tends to be organisations we really trust to have your best interest at heart and want to do something useful for you.
Find out more about Arts Emergency by visiting their official website.
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