Leadership Lab Awarded Funding from Cultural Leadership Programme
PANDA, GMMAZ, Music Leader North West and Substance join together to deliver a new and exciting Cultural Leadership Programme.
Leadership Lab is the first Cultural Leadership Partnership in the North West. The partnership of performing arts, music and monitoring and evaluation specialist organisations, has been awarded £60,000 to develop a programme of activity for leaders both within and outside the partner organisations. One of the main aims of the programme is to encourage leaders to embrace risk, innovation and entrepreneurial thinking.
Over the next 18 months Leadership Lab aims to experiment with imaginative leadership solutions creating a new model of partnership, fresh approaches to professional development and utilising future technologies. The partner organisations will embark on delivering a programme of practical training through the ‘Pitch Perfects’ and the ‘Imperfect Pilots’ and shared and continued learning through online resource ‘The Learning Cloud’.
The funding has been given as part of the second round of the CLP’s Meeting the Challenge: Development Programme, a groundbreaking initiative launched in 2008 to improve leadership in the UK’s cultural sector which generates an estimated £56 billion for the economy.
Tina Redford, Head of Music Leader North West, said:
“Given our Meeting the Challenge programme is called the Leadership Lab, this grant enables everything we deliver, as a partnership, to have a high degree of risk and experimentation. This is a delightfully rare opportunity and we intend to capitalise upon it."
“The partnership itself is an innovative model with a "roving co-ordinator" and no lead organisation. Partnerships often fall prey to economics and politics. By creating a genuinely democratic model, we will have equal ownership of the programmes successes or failures. It would be fantastic if this way of partnership-working could be a new model for us to share across our region, and, indeed the wider arts sector.”
Leadership Lab is one of four projects to have been awarded money in the second round of Meeting The Challenge from the Cultural Leadership Programme: Four York is a partnership between York Museums Trust, York Theatre Royal, Pilot Theatre and York City Archives and City Library which covers all aspects of the arts and culture in the City of York; The Associate Company Scheme will provide leadership and organisational development opportunities for three producing companies at the Young Vic - Opera Group, Fevered Sleep and B3Media; and The Leadership and Organisational Development Programme, a partnership led by Tate will be working within 11 museums and art galleries in England.
Twenty-three organisations have formed four partnerships in order to run the leadership development projects. All the projects will run for 18 months using a range of activities including placements, secondments, networking, coaching and mentoring. They will also benefit from the support of a Lead Advisor provided by the Cultural Leadership Programme.
For more information about the Leadership Lab please contact Zoe Pickering on
07739 814 382 or by email at Zoe@leadershiplab.org.uk.
