Shetland Arts Development Agency was established in 2006 with the merging of Shetland Arts Trust with the Islesburgh Trust. Led since 2014 by general manager Graeme Howell, it employs some 120 people working a variety of shift patterns, equating to roughly 45 people FTE. Working across Shetland, its turnover is £2.5m, of which approximately £1.5m is earned income, through activities at its own venue, Mareel, which includes a cinema. A further £700,000 comes from the Shetland Charitable Trust, £250,000 comes from Creative Scotland, and £90,000 is earned for delivery of formal education.

Mission: enabling Shetlanders to live a creative life

Prior to Graeme Howell’s arrival at Shetland Arts, the organisation was becoming quite focused on “our own bricks and mortar”; now it’s more concerned with thinking about place and population. Of the 100 islands, 15 are inhabited, by 23,200 people, the majority living on the biggest island, Mainland. But while some 6,000 people live in Lerwick, Mainland’s capital, other islands have a much smaller population: down to 350 on Unst, and 55 on Fair Isle.

Howell sees the organisation’s job as making sure that in choosing to live in Shetland, people still have access to the same cultural provision that they could experience in Scotland’s central belt, and can “live a creative life. I’ve moved away from talking about us as an arts organisation: I talk about it as being part of the live, work, invest agenda. Shetland needs to attract about 1500 economically active people to come and live here over the next 10 years, just to maintain our current level of services, and as much as people come here because it’s beautiful, you still want your kids to go to the cinema, you still want to experience high-quality music or art.”

By current level of services, he particularly means social provision such as health and education. He recalls a recent visit to Unst, where he asked “a number of the creators who live there, what do you want from us? One of them said: we’re fighting to hold on to our school, we’re fighting to hold on to our GP, we don’t really care what you do. It really struck me that actually our job is to make sure that people keep wanting to live in Unst because that’s the best way to maintain the school and maintain the GP. The role of an organisation like ours is to make a place liveable, and I don’t think we’ve done enough.”

“Our job is to make sure that people keep wanting to live in Unst because that’s the best way to maintain the school and maintain the GP. The role of an organisation like ours is to make a place liveable, and I don’t think we’ve done enough.”

A different set of meetings

The decision to pursue a liveability agenda has prompted Howell to establish dialogue with non-arts service providers and council bodies. “If there’s an economic development meeting, a poverty meeting, or a meeting about mental health, those are the ones I turn up to. Last year we were invited to join the community partnerships, the multi-agency working group that runs Shetland, alongside the council, the police, the NHS, and a number of other non-statutory bodies who can contribute to the overall delivery of the local outcome improvement plan. It means I’m sitting alongside the chief executive of the council, the chief of police, talking about the role we can play in solving those issues.”

In turn this affects how he thinks about cultural provision. Three instances are indicative of this shift:

1: Well-being

Responding to Shetland’s “huge problem with isolationism, and the mental health issues that come off that”, and Howell’s sense of “the well-being strand as an area for potential growth”, Shetland Arts is supporting multiple activities including film screenings in care homes and a chat-and-stitch dementia group. Particularly successful is the well-being choir, launched in 2016, for which “the ability to sing or read music is neither here nor there. Once a week a bunch of people turn up and sing pop songs, and after they feel great.”

2: The employability pathway

“If you can’t get a job, you leave the island”

Although Shetland has a low unemployment rate – “basically if you can’t get a job, you leave the island” – it does have “a number of people in very complex situations”. Shetland Arts works with the employability pathway to enable its clients, who might have, for instance, addiction issues, to come to the cinema for free: this requires them to make an appointment, travel to the venue, and exercise social skills. The organisation also offers “back-to-work experience, so we may take someone for six weeks, to get them back in to the habit of being somewhere all day”.

3: The primary-school challenge

Howell has set his team a challenge for 2018 onwards: “How are we going to do at least two things a year for every primary-school child in Shetland? There are schools with three or four children in them, so the cost of trying to deliver something for them is massive. But it’s really important if these communities are going to sustain themselves.”

Challenges

Essentially, Shetland Arts must maintain a constant balancing act of conflicting expectations. Howell is aware that: “If you have chosen to live in Unst, we are never going to do enough activity in Unst for you to be satisfied. Or if you live in Shetland and you’re a huge fan of contemporary dance, we’re never going to do enough contemporary dance for you to be satisfied.” He hopes that the focus on liveability will shift this dialogue.

Those expectations also apply in terms of how Shetland Arts supports the development of artists. Rather than take sole responsibility for, say, the applied art and craft community, Howell puts an emphasis on “connectivity”, preferring to “make sure we signpost people on to other more specialist organisations, better funded than us, that can help them”. It means that people will often ask why Shetland Arts isn’t doing what other organisations or promoters are doing, to which Howell answers: “It’s because we don’t need to: they’re doing it. We don’t need to do everything and we can’t do everything.”

That connectivity requires not only taking the art of Shetland out but bringing outside influences to the islands. Howell refers specifically to theatre: “Because the only theatre in Shetland is a traditional proscenium-arched theatre with a thrust stage, to Shetlanders, that’s what theatre is. So as soon as you start trying to do something that isn’t that, the theatre community says: well no, this is what a theatre is.” Previously Shetland Arts has attempted to programme the same work in both Mareel and village halls, whereas Howell is now working with promoters to identify “stuff that’s suitable for village halls, and stuff that’s suitable for Mareel”.

What next?

Howell describes Shetland Arts as an organisation in transition, from a focus on programming for a bespoke venue to a focus on extending its activities across the islands, no matter how rural. “It’s about doing what we’re doing in other places. The structure is there, so now it’s about how do we do this in Unst, how do we do this in Foula? Maybe it’s not a well-being choir – it might be a well-being reading group. The art that’s wrapped around it doesn’t matter, it’s what’s going to work for the local community.” The expectation is that Shetland Arts will lose some 10,000 audience attendances, through cutting down activities in Mareel and instead increasing the rural effort.

To be successful in this, Howell argues, the organisation needs “stability, because then we can plan. If you’re in a job like mine and you think you’ve got enough money you should resign, because it means you’ve run out of ideas.”