People really enjoy talking about the charity sector with no knowledge, huh? So let’s break it down:
- Kate isn’t patron of The Art Room and hasn’t been since January 2018. If you look at her pages on the royal website it is not listed amongst her patronages. This is because it merged with Place2Be in 2018 because it was having financial difficulties and is therefore a project of Place2Be, not a charity. Anyone who doesn’t know this should probably be written off immediately for not doing basic research
-Patrons have no legal role in their charities and cannot legally make decisions about what is and isn’t continued. They are not consulted about strategic decisions
-There have been discussions about how she could have raised the money etc etc. If you look at the accounts they were getting money in for The Art Room. It’s a trendy thing, there’s lots of funders out there for the arts. It’s not about not being able to make the money. It’s about sustainability and value for money. The Art Room is unfortunately an unsustainable model with low value for money. Let me explain how:
-The Art Room costs over £860,000 a year to run. Whatever other figures you’re seeing twirling about are not accurate. They may be the cost of running a reduced service in one location but The Art Room as it stands cost Place2Be £860,000 in their last set of independently audited accounts. That is a reduction in costs as before the merge it cost about £1.1 million to run The Art Room as a separate organisation. This figure will rise every year because of inflation and would only maintain the current level of provision. Expanding the service would increase the costs further
-In order for a service to be considered sustainable it either has to generate its own income or you have to have a diversified, secure funding pipeline. Even if one major donor came in and said they’d give £860k for it to continue that would not be considered good because what about the year after? Five years after? Ten? Twenty? It is poor practice to have a major, continuous project dependent on the whims of one donor. So even if The Royal Foundation had funded it- which they wouldn’t, they rarely commit that amount and they are venture philanthropists so they only fund projects until they’re considered sustainable- or one of Kate’s rich friends or the fandom (lol) they would still be in this position next year or the year after.
-Unfortunately The Art Room model is also low value for money. With that £860,000 they are in eight schools permanently and have offered some kind of service to 54 schools in total. To give you some perspective there are around 30,000 schools in England, Scotland and Wales. They are in less than 0.2% of schools. Those numbers are not good enough which is why they had to merge with Place2Be in the first place.
-The Art Room is not closing entirely, it’s just taking on a new model. As with many charity sector initiatives it is stepping away from providing one off services and moving towards training and dissemination. Generating income takes time and money. If you had the option to spend that time and money delivering face to face services to 54 schools or delivering training on your approach to school staff in hundreds of schools across the nation- staff who can then take it to their own local context and adapt it for their school’s needs- which would you pick? There is only one right answer.
Thank you for sharing your experience evolvingdoors. I'm sorry that the program that you attended didn't provide that support/guidance to parents so they could better understand their student's needs. I can only hope that over time the program was able to include that so everyone could benefit.?
