Creating a movement

Tell us a bit about how you started out working within the arts, and the origins of Global Grooves.

I've always been involved in the arts since I was a child. I've never made a conscious decision to become an artist or do this for a living. I had quite a passion for music in particular. And I was very lucky to meet some really inspirational teachers and tutors and friends, who are now colleagues, that supported me through that journey and helped me to believe that there was a way to continue to do this professionally. 

As a young person I went along to a community drumming group in Mossley. One of my friends who I was in a band with at the time asked me to come along, play some drums, and meet some new people. I said I'd give it a try, but it didn’t sound like my bag. I was into heavy rock and the idea of playing a tambourine in a community centre didn't really appeal to me. Didn't feel cool. But I went up there, picked up a drum, started playing and had an amazing time! And it’s where I met Holly Prest who's now the Artistic Director of Global Grooves, and we continued to go religiously.

Through that journey, we got more serious about learning the intricacies of the instrument and thirsty to know more. So we started to go to groups in Manchester city centre. We went on study trips. We started to learn more about those different instruments, and what we discovered was that there wasn't necessarily a next step for us. We'd soaked in all this information, but it didn't really feel like there was anything more that we could do with what we were doing in our local area. And that made us think about how we would be able to find those opportunities or create those opportunities ourselves.

We started studying internationally, Brazil and West Africa and India and all these places. To find out more about percussion and particularly how that relates to the communities where those ideas and musical forms are from, what that means for those people and how that art form is used to support communities and individuals, and build healthy environments for people to thrive. Then we brought all those ideas back with us and looked at how some of those models might change communities and individuals here in the UK.

And over time that idea grew and grew. And I remember we were sat one night after a rehearsal, myself and Holly and Eraldo who we'd met in Brazil, who's another Executive Director of Global Grooves now. All the young people had been discussing how amazing it would be to have our own space and our own centre for percussion, dance and Carnival. Fast forward to today and we've got a centre of excellence for Carnival Arts. We have a venue. We have an amazing team of artists and people that are passionate about that idea of the power of music and the arts to change people's lives. The organisation is born from a need to almost repay those opportunities that we've had to young people and to communities that we come into contact with every day. 

So rather than looking at Global Grooves as an organisation, we see it more of a movement. The idea that if everybody's moving in the same direction for whatever reason they're there, whether that’s to build their self-confidence, to learn more about their art form, to understand more about business development, to have a platform to shine and to perform and to show off, everybody's moving together in the same direction. And Global Grooves provides the environment for that to happen. So we don't see the organisation as strictly a business. It’s actually a theory, it's still an experiment. Luckily this experiment is going very well!

That’s so inspiring to hear. What a journey. Over the course of that journey were there any key challenges that you faced, or still face today?

We’re always conscious of adapting our programmes to meet the needs of the people that might invest in that work. Keeping hold of the integrity of the work at the same time as finding ways to support the idea is a balancing act.

Additionally, Global Grooves is based in Tameside, and the cultural sector here is a lot less developed. It's a lot earlier in its journey. So often we find that we have to create structures and environments and the foundations for art to bloom before we can even run the project. Which is very different to working in Manchester. There's a different kind of cultural ecology that already exists there to support arts and cultures to bloom.

How about the structure of the organisation? In the same vein of balancing the integrity of your work and your mission, did you find anything similar when choosing the right structural fit for Global Grooves?

It was very much trial and error and guesswork. We originally started off just as a project, as an idea. Then we moved into a community group model and we saw that had some barriers to accessing funding and support because it wasn't quite as structured as other options. Then we moved into a charity structure, which worked well for us for many years, but that also had a lot of challenges, particularly with how some of those structures affected our ability to be autonomous. 

So eventually, we got really excited about this idea of a social enterprise, which is a key driving force within Global Grooves. Global Grooves is a community benefit society, it's a social enterprise and it’s a business, with a commercial arm to it that provides almost 50% of our fundraising. And we set up in that way because it allowed us to be very nimble, it allowed us to be autonomous and it allowed us to make our own decisions without having to jump through hoops to get there.

And often we’re now working with organisations and individuals that are asking those same questions. We offer support to artists, young people and old, in business development. What we often say is there isn't really an answer. It's within you to find which model fits you best. It’s been a challenge and we’ve spent a lot of time looking at governance and different models of business. But finding that community benefit society model for Global Grooves has been a real achievement because it has really aligned with what we want to do.

Do you have any insights or learning to share on balancing the administrative tasks involved in running a business, and staying motivated creatively?

It’s really important to us as an organisation to have at the helm of Global Grooves really skilled artists in lots of diverse forms. And there is always a tension between the administration and business development and the creative needs of staff. The bigger we grow, the more burden the administrative tasks become. But Global Grooves has a very flexible model in the way it works, and we make sure that our team has the time to continue to explore their creative outputs. So that might be somebody going to study for three months abroad. It could be having the flexibility to take days off so that people can go and do their own freelance work, or they can continue to perform or go on tour. Again, it's going back to that idea of integrity. If none of our team are getting any creative stimulus or any further skills within their art form, our work suffers from it.

Secondly to that, Global Grooves exists to provide the environment for Carnival arts to bloom, and the key word there is environment. Without those structures, without administration, without fundraising, without finance and resources, without all of those almost dry and boring things, all of our amazing projects can't happen. At all times we understand that and if we can create the environment for somebody else to do something, and that's an amazing creative output and it's reaching loads of people, then we’re as excited about that idea when we're doing the budgets as the person delivering the session.

And those two things together, that flexibility to be creative and pursue our own artistic talents, and the understanding that what we are doing is unlocking all that creative potential for somebody else to do something, means that it doesn't feel like such a burden. It’s really helped us to be able to take a backseat from the creative and make friends with the idea of administration.

What do you find most exciting about working within the arts?

The most valuable thing I've seen is that Global Grooves is a bit like a family, and within our team of artists and our participants and our management team there's this circular development that happens. So through our Future Leaders programme, young people are coming through as artists, and then they're becoming members of staff, and then they're blooming within their art form because they've got the freedom to be able to develop that. And you can really see this growth of people within the organisation and see these people bloom through being involved in what we do.

Amazing, nice one! So finally, anything to plug?

It'd be great to see people at the Vale in Mossley. We've got a year round programme of events, from masterclasses and workshops with international artists to amazing performances in our venue. So come and have a brew. Come and get involved in a project. Come in and see a gig. You're all really welcome!