Guide for 5 year lifeline
ARTS COLLABORATORY | GUIDE FOR 5 YEAR LIFELINE
Stop Surviving and Start Living (Together).
Dear Friends. This is simply a guideline to support the making of your Lifeline Plans. Treat it as a Counter-instruction-manual-form!
SHORT GUIDE (Full guide from next page)
Define your Struggle
Define what you want to focus on and what you want to change, within and outwith of your organisation.
2. Portrait your Ecosystem (formally known as Resource Map)
Illustrate, draw and un/map your Resources, relations and position in your ecosystem.
Your resources might be positive or negative. Eg. Political and geographical situation. People, places, products, knowledge, the time you have or don’t have.
3. Imagine, Plan and Write your Life, Time and Story
Narrate the next 5 years of what you want and need to do in relation to your struggle, ecosystem and Arts Collaboratory. And how will you sustain what you do?
Relate this story to your self-portrait. How will the your Portrait change over the 5 years? How might your Struggles change?
4. Write a Financial Storybook
How will you use (spend/invest) money? How will you save money? How will you make money? And how will you share or not need money?
5. Question Box If you have any concerns or questions you can Study Buddy with willing buddies during the time to submit. But if you have bigger issues to the whole AC group then write them in the Question Box in order to raise them during the AC Assembly. |
External “DEAD” Line for 12 Organisations to submit a first draft:
8th November 2015 (to receive funds by January 2016)
External “DEAD” Line for 12 Organisations to submit a first draft:
9th January 2016 (to receive funds by March 2016)
Internal Life-Line: After Study Buddying with each other we can submit our final Life-Line Plan on: 1st April 2016
LONGER GUIDE
1. Define your Struggle
Define what you want to focus on, to change, inside and outside of your organisation. Focus does not mean you have to exclude other concerns but that you address things from your focal point. At best, it can enable you to work less and more sharply.
Here is a proposed exercise with the members of your organisation for identifying and focusing on your Struggles.
1) Define the Struggles that your organization wants to address (what do you want to change in your ecosystem). Define the social / cultural / artistic / political / economic changes that you are committed to.
2) Make a priority list to focus on a few Struggles, based on the desires and capacity of the members in your organisation. Elaborate on these chosen Struggles.
3) Reflect on who else in your environment is working on these Struggles and how you relate to that. Would you like to sharpen / shift your focus in relation to that? Where can you inter-relate more?
4) Reflect on your priority list. Consider the strategic benefits and difficulties of your focus:
Where, how and why does “art“( radical imagination, creative, aesthetic…) work in this context for the concerns we have (our struggles)? Why do we do things with/through art? Why not just a social movement, activism, lobby and/or politics?
After defining your struggles, you can start to build your Self-Portrait of your ecosystem (formerly known as Resource Map)
2. Portrait your Ecosystem
Create a portrait of your organization and its ecosystem. This portrait gives your position and relations in the ecosystem that you belong to. Consider all your tangible and intangible resources that contribute to a well being of the ecosystem. It also reflects the effect you are having in your community and the way you are affected by your context. This portrait can become our common, open resource / tool which we share beyond our own organisation and Arts Collaboratory.
The portrait has no template or form. You draw freely. The most interesting aspect of this portrait is the creative and imaginative approach that each organization can have for creating it. (Please note: Consider that this ecosystem would be in constant transformation as your Lifeline continues and the portrait therefore needs to be updated constantly).
Our ecosystems can be made of the following: Please feel free to add other kind of resources. For the elaboration of these, see the bottom of this Guide.
Composition of living organization;
Ethos philosophy of organization and the (co) management principle (vision?);
Capacities, skills and experiences;
People / communities around you;
Different types of relation;
Knowledge;
“Financial” Resources;
Media Resources;
Physical Resources;
Influences Tools.
3. Imagine, Write and Plan your Life, Time and Story
Now that we have five years financial security and a network of critical friends, we can do a deep exercise of pushing boundaries of imagination. We can think in long-term investments. We can plan projects and ideas that can make a radical change in our organizations and a radical change in our ecosystem. We may allow ourselves to leave way for the habits of programming and producing we are familiar with.
The Life-Time-Story tells: What and where will you be in five years? What are your dreams and desires? WHAT, HOW, WHEN and with WHOM are you going to do it? How do you push a change in your organization and ecosystem’s portrait?
Inspiring Questions for your Imagination and Writing of our Life Time Stories:
How can exchanges and encounters with other members of your eco system help you to achieve your dreams and desires?
How do you influence AC, as an ecosystem, now and in 5 years? And vice versa, how does AC influence you?
What is your function for your ‘satellites’, other communities, organizations and artists, outside of your organization?
How do you draw the borderline of AC? What will happen to this edge in the next five years?
How do you sustain and expand your connection to AC’s ethical principles?
How much can your organization contribute in Care Time and Study Time to the AC Ecosystem?
How are you going to use Banga, Assembly, and Study Buddy as an important process while making Lifeline Plan?
How long do you think your organization will last or need to last?
When will you be ready to leave AC’s funding (still remaining in the network)?
4. Write a Financial Storybook
How will you spend/invest, save, make and even, make away, with money?
Align your Financial Storybook with your Life-Time-Story, Portrait and AC Ethical Principles.
Create a Financial Storybook which:
Covers a period of 5 years;
Indicates the total budget - expense and income - of your organization (money from AC, from other donors, earned money, donations, etc) for the 5 years;
Indicates the annual division of it;
Indicates how you envisage to spend the amount you get from AC as a basic income for your organization (as it is now: 50,000 Euro a year);
Indicates how you plan to use money you get from AC for the collective AC activities such as Banga, Assembly, Communication, Collective Saving Pot, and Time Strike and the unforeseen (in 2016 it is 20,000 Euro)
Indicates vision and plan on: Spending, Saving, Sharing, Investing and Generating Money;
Some core concepts - Self-Limitation, Radical Imagination, Transparency, Solidarity, Trust, Mutualism in our Ethical Principles in forms of questions are following:
Do you need the full core funds (50,000 Euro) each year?
Can you contribute some of these funds to the AC Collective Saving Pot?
Are there times when you need more money and other times not?
Can we share our budgets with all AC partners, artists and other cultural organisations?
Form of the Financial Storybook
The financial storybook can take any form. It can be intertwined into the Life-Time-Story directly or it can be a separate excel sheet. It can be a pie chart. What it needs to show is how, and how much, money will be spent, saved, shared, invested and generated over the next five years.
5. Question Box If you have any concerns or questions you can Study Buddy with willing buddies during the time to submit. But if you have bigger issues to the whole AC group then write them in a Question Box in order to raise them during the AC Assembly. Here’s some questions to start with (mainly related to money for some reason!) – PLEASE ADD MORE ABOUT ANYTHING!!!
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