Creative NZ: Future Strengths Strategy

FUTURE STRENGTHS STRATEGY

The Future Strengths strategy will address issues of urgency for the professional arts infrastructure in New Zealand. In particular, the strategy will focus on the following areas over the next three years:

For existing organisations:

 Stability: support for organisations, particularly in the performing arts, to stabilise their financial position; plan with more certainty; and enjoy greater security in their funding base.

 Capability: assistance for organisations seeking to review their strategic, artistic or organisational position and, in particular, to implement strategies that will strengthen marketing and audience development capabilities across the sector.

 Development: opportunities for organisations to invest in new projects, experiment, and manage artistic risk-taking.

For emerging organisations:

 New opportunities: support for a number of arts organisations to move from project funding to annual funding, adding new voices to Creative New Zealand’s recurrently funded organisations. This will build new audiences, encourage greater diversity and acknowledge standards of excellence.

The Future Strengths strategy will be implemented as an extension of Creative New Zealand’s portfolio management of its 31 recurrently funded arts organisations (ie organisations funded on an annual or multi-year basis). Priority will be given to the performing arts. However, all artforms will benefit over the three-year span of the strategy.

In its first year, Future Strengths will cost $3.2 million.

The first stage of announcements on the distribution of funds via Future Strengths will be made in August 2000, when the Arts Board and Te Waka Toi confirm offers of grants to recurrently funded organisations. Creative New Zealand currently funds four organisations on a multi-year basis and some annually funded organisations will be moving to multi-year funding, thus providing more stability and a greater capacity to plan ahead.

Links with the Seriously Maori strategy and close consultation between the Arts Board and Te Waka Toi will ensure that Maori arts infrastructure is strengthened and appropriately supported.

At the end of three years, Future Strengths aims to have achieved the following:

 funding stability for more arts organisations
 increased levels of funding for most of Creative New Zealand’s recurrently funded organisations
 a wider range of artistic services to artists and audiences
 opportunities for innovation across the sector
 more employment opportunities for professional artists.

By the end of 2003, Future Strengths will have contributed to a professional arts infrastructure in New Zealand with increased capacity to address arts and audience development challenges posed by the twenty-first century.

ENDS

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