“Arts and cultural activities are dynamic and interactive, operating in an integrated system that incorporates the process of creation, production, presentation, preservation, interpretation and dissemination. The cultural sector contains a wide variety of interlinked individuals and organizations – amateur and professional, for-profit and non-profit, commercial and industrial – interacting through a complementary array of revenues and resources, including earned revenues, government investments, corporate sponsorships, individual donations, audience and visitor ticket sales, volunteer time and in-kind contributions….The artistic and technical resources provided through the non-profit segment are key to the continued vitality and creativity of for-profit entities in the cultural sector. As well, spill-over effects are felt in a host of related fields which we experience every day in our communities – from advertising to fashion design to computer software development.” [1]
The majority of arts and culture companies and organizations are small to medium sized enterprises or micro-businesses (fewer than 10 employees). The sector is heavily dependent on self-employed freelancers, short-contract workers and volunteers. The result is a workforce where many workers do not have enough insured earnings to qualify for Employment Insurance benefits during times of unemployment, who must pay for their own professional development and basic health care, and where earnings are so low that workers cannot develop the cash reserves to cover contingencies or build a business. Creating sustainable income in this environment is a challenge at best.
This is the sector that creative people trained in arts and culture or with a vocation and a passion to work in the arts must navigate. From one entry point - as an actor, a dancer, a writer, a festival volunteer - the emerging cultural worker must expand their knowledge of the sector, its complexities, the various bureaucracies, and the methodologies of its economy, just to begin to see the cultural landscape and how to earn a living within it.
Many people in mid-career still struggle through the highs and lows, and there are few resources available to help speed up the process. Many decide to go back to school as if more credentials or job skills will help them, and thus become more burdened with debt, re-tooled with more skills, and still no concept of how to generate a sustainable livelihood within the existing employment system paradigm.
Rarely, despite all this effort and investment, do cultural workers get the business, self-employment or self-marketing skills that are the top requirements for understanding what to do and for generating needed capital and cash flow. As a result, the labour force in the cultural sector is the most highly educated and under-employed of any group in Canada, ironically, in an environment that is crying out for skilled workers, and workers with just the combination of soft skills they possess.
“British Columbia’s vibrant and diversified arts and culture activities make vital economic and social contributions to our province and country:
Yet despite its significant place in Canada’s economy and social infrastructure, the cultural sector is facing serious human resource challenges. These are widely documented in several recent regional and national studies and reports. The poor infrastructure for growth and sustainability of cultural institutions and organizations, which are the usual employers of cultural workers, has exacerbated the difficulties of workers in the sector.
We are working hard to ensure that the attention being paid to the crisis will result in comprehensive human resource planning and some immediate interventions that will ameliorate these problems so that employment within the sector is more sustainable. We need people to stay and build our capacity. However, this still means that employment in the cultural sector must not be viewed as the only option for people with training and experience in the arts. These workers have employability skills, and transferable hard and soft skills that are in demand in other sectors.
The biggest barrier that many cultural workers face is their own expectations of making a living in the arts. They do not see themselves as business people, nor fitting into corporate jobs, or they feel unqualified for well-paying positions for which they do not have direct training. And potential employers in other sectors do hold stereotypical ideas about the arts and artist-types, that must be overcome. Both these challenges require the job-seeker to have a strong sense of their skills’ transferability and value, and an ability to see all potential employers as ‘clients’, researching their needs and corporate culture to determine a successful self-marketing strategy.
We have focused on the sustainability of the cultural worker in this complex reality. Appropriate employment outside the sector is frequently much better paid, can be a healthy environment for a creative person, and often requires skilled project-oriented and self-motivated workers who are flexible. As an important component of their career plans, participants learn how they might approach survival work without subverting their passion or under-pricing their best skills.
What this means is that cultural workers need the opportunity to learn that they must be exceedingly entrepreneurial in approaching work in our sector, and have good skills at self-marketing, career self-management, and small business management. Unfortunately, few of them are made aware of the priority to acquire these skills, and rarely offered the opportunity to learn them. In fact, for many, burdened with stereotypical ideas of the starving artist, with fear of moral judgments and limited thinking about commercialism, and the difficulty of placing a value on work that is frequently so personal, this ensures that too large a proportion of people in our sector will struggle for most of their lives to find a way to create a living from their training in the arts. All this while the need for creative capital and a flexible labour force grows all around us.
However, these people represent an unfulfilled investment by our society: the highly educated and under-employed. They are skilled and resourceful, creative and driven by passion. They may not always know it, but they represent the ideal contingency workers for the new economy. In order for them realize their full potential for employment, they must have some critical information and must overcome some key misconceptions in order to create and take advantage of opportunities for employment and self-employment.
This was offered by a program developed in 1996 at the Alliance for Arts and Culture when Judi Piggott designed a proposal for funding under the Employment Assistance Services program of Human Resources Development Canada. This program tackled the specific issues holding these participants back, and utilized an interactive, participatory model.
As our sector works to solve its problems and rebuilds to take its rightfully visible place among the economic engines of Canada’s economy, the legacy of the S.E.A.R.C.H. Program and its nearly 2000 participant cultural workers continues to impact thinking about these issues. For creative and unconventional people to generate a sustainable livelihood, to take their place as the creative resource of the knowledge-based economy, and to prevent them from being the last to benefit financially from their own talents, skills and creativity - that is our mission.
