An innovative online strategic package in response to the COVID-19 crisis, helping small arts organisations build resilience and sustain their work, now and for the future.
How did the collaboration come about?
Take Note developed bespoke ‘Take Away’ packages as a strategic response to COVID-19, to share Take Note’s tools and approach with social change organisations and help them plan for an uncertain future. Play for Progress identified that this would support them through a pivotal period, as they respond to the ongoing COVID-19 crisis with adapted, but continued, holistic support for young people from refugee and asylum seeking backgrounds, and as they embark upon longer-term strategic planning and securing multi-year core funding. Harriet’s Trust generously funded Take Note’s time in delivering this and a series of other Take Away packages.
How did the collaborators collaborate?
Take Note is a new methodology for collaboration, working with arts organisations to achieve greater collective impact. We support arts organisations with social missions to deliver extraordinary work together, to create a stronger, more sustainable ecosystem for social change.
Harriet’s Trust is a private funder that supports charities and initiatives where the arts are used as a tool for social change.
Play for Progress is a charity that delivers therapeutic and educational music and arts programmes, advocacy, and wellbeing support for traumatised and socially-isolated unaccompanied minor refugees and asylum-seekers.
What were the most important factors that contributed to the success of this project?
Response to need
Combination of skill sets
The ‘big’ idea
Social impact
Available funding
Project funding
Through the generous support of Harriet’s Trust.
Will the project continue beyond COVID-19 lockdown?
Take Note developed the Take Away package in response to the COVID-19 crisis, to support organisations with their crisis response and resilience-building for the uncertain future we now all face. We will evaluate the impact of this package and integrate our findings and approach into our overarching Take Note methodology. Our work with Play for Progress continues as we collaborate to create their first full Theory of Change, to provide them with a clear strategic framework for now and beyond the COVID-19 crisis.
Take Note’s longer-term delivery of Take Away will focus on the third package, Strategic Network Development. This aims to support networks or arts/non-arts organisations to strengthen their collective response to an ever shifting and changing environment beyond COVID-19. Our support will ultimately enhance the effectiveness of their collective delivery and their collaborative advocacy for social change, using Take Note tools and techniques to achieve this change more effectively.
Any other comment?
The package worked with Play for Progress as a social change organisation to develop strategically, which in turn will impact on the young people they work with.
We supported Play for Progress to develop a new Theory of Change for their organisation – to define their long-term vision, to articulate the challenges they are working to address, and to establish the outcomes of their work in order to best demonstrate the profound impact they have on young people and their communities.