Inspiring children through the arts

Posted 20th May 2008 17:35pm

Rebecca Eastmond, Director, The Prince's Foundation for Children and the Arts

The work that we do at The Prince’s Foundation for Children & the Arts is very simple but it can be transformational.

Recently, I sat in an audience of 1,600 10- and 11-year-olds in Blackpool, watching the world-class Philharmonia Orchestra perform live.

This concert marked the culmination of a project which has given generalist primary teachers skills and confidence in using classical music in the classroom and has given children the chance to work, in class, with some of the UK’s best musicians.

The children were initially excited, jumping up and down to see “their” musician on stage. After the excitement died down, they sat, transfixed, throughout. The feedback we have received from teachers and children speaks for itself:

“I felt quite emotional at the end, by the passion they all showed for music. I just wish I could have brought EVERYONE from my school with us! I wanted to put it in a bottle and give everyone a taste!!” Mrs Roberts, St John Vianney RC Primary School

“Dear Simon and Zara, Thank you very much for coming to school and playing the fantastic music that you played. It made me feel like I was in heaven.” Emmie, Stanley Primary School

“Dear Kevin, I loved your conducting. It made my heart blow away.” Dominic, Stanley Primary School

Children & the Arts provides a structure to the schools we work with that enables them to build a long-term relationship with an excellent cultural venue and means that the children involved develop a real sense that the venue belongs to them. When we stop working with a school we want to ensure that the teachers, the children and their parents know exactly how to carry on what we have started.

The relationship we foster between each school and its partner venue involves going to the venue, to see exhibitions or productions and finding out how it works behind the scenes. It involves giving teachers training opportunities that will help them lose any nervousness they have about using the arts and ensure that they get the best out of working with creative practitioners, musicians, artists or storytellers visiting the school and working with the children. It usually also involves a finale where the children can invite family members to the venue to see what they have been working on and it often provides discounted tickets, to encourage children and their parents to visit outside school time.

It costs us just £25 to work with a child and their teacher for a year and we are working with over 26,000 children in the current year. We want to do much more.

A whirlwind of activity at Dumfries House

Posted 19th May 2008 15:44pm by Mike Schafer

By Mike Schafer, Chief Executive of The Great Steward of Scotland’s Dumfries House Trust

Since taking up the reigns of Dumfries House in January, I have been caught up in a whirlwind of activity to prepare the house for the public opening in the summer. A great deal has been achieved since the house was purchased last year by the consortium, led by HRH The Prince of Wales, but there is still much more to do. We’re also very keen to involve the local community and recently held a public consultation on the plans for the development of related land.

The house itself is one of the most architecturally significant stately homes within the UK. It was designed by the renowned 18th Century architect brothers John, Robert and James Adam, and was built between 1754 and 1760 for the 5th Earl of Dumfries. What is of equal importance is the furniture collection, as here we hold the most important collection of works from Thomas Chippendale’s Director period.

Most of these pieces remain in their original position in the house and are all stunning items. No other museum or country house can match the content and quality of our collection and makes the preservation of Dumfries House even more pertinent for Scottish cultural history. The BBC will be filming an episode of the Antiques Roadshow here later in the year and I’m sure they’ll have plenty of delights to discover within the house alone.

It’s incredibly exciting to see the plans coming together and will be such a satisfying moment for all of us involved to see the first visitors come through the doors. I personally can’t wait for everyone to see with their own eyes just how special Dumfries House is…

Click here to visit The Great Steward of Scotland’s Dumfries House Trust website.
 

Working with business for the benefit of all

Posted 19th May 2008 15:37pm by Stephen Howard

Stephen Howard, Chief Executive, Business in the Community

Business in the Community is about mobilising business for good. One of our current priorities is climate change. This is an issue that has been driven by The Prince of Wales and culminated in the creation last May of The Prince of Wales’s May Day Network, the largest movement of businesses committed to taking practical action to tackle climate change. We hope that by 2011 we will have 100,000 businesses engaged with the network and committed to take action.

An initiative that we have launched more recently with the support of The Prince of Wales is Mosaic. This is an exciting new mentoring programme to create a resource of successful Muslims, who though their knowledge and experience aim to address the issues facing young Muslims and raise their aspirations.

For the past 18 years we have been taking senior business leaders into communities to visit schools, community groups and prisons as part of The Prince’s Seeing is Believing programme. This programme provides a powerful personal experience for participants and enables them to witness effective examples of how business leaders can shape society through their actions, both inside and outside their businesses.

For 25 years we have successfully worked to raise awareness and tackle urban poverty and deprivation. However, in 2001, at the request of The Prince of Wales, Business in the Community launched Rural Action to inspire business to make a difference to the prosperity of our countryside. Working in partnership with companies and other rural stakeholders, Rural Action aims to support rural communities to be vibrant and sustainable

In the current climate we are seeing a rise in global competition, in which people will be the UK’s only certain natural resource for the future. Our work places will see large numbers of unskilled jobs being replaced with high skilled ones. At Business in the Community we are working with business and government on this critical issue to discover how we can unlock a wide range of talent that is hidden in the UK, the aspiration to use them and the enterprise to put them to work.

At Business in the Community we believe that responsible business practice should be part of the DNA of an organisation. It should be an essential ingredient in everything that a business does.
 

An integrated approach to healthcare

Posted 19th May 2008 15:29pm

By Kim Lavely, Chief Executive of The Prince's Foundation for Integrated Health (FIH)

At FIH, we have a vision of a society in which people are inspired to achieve optimal health and wellbeing. At the moment you could argue that our health system in this country is an ‘illness service’ – you wait until something is wrong with you, then go to the doctor looking for the right pill to fix the problem.

We want to see a system where there’s a much stronger emphasis on prevention and self-care – so that throughout their lives people can make choices about food, housing, exercise and community that will support their wellbeing. We’d like to see messages about health being reinforced by schools, workplaces and community centres – rather than just being the preserve of doctors.

In the end of course, almost all of us will need help from healthcare professionals. We make the case for healthcare that makes use of all appropriate therapeutic approaches, healthcare professionals and disciplines – allowing for patient choice with a human face.

As a charity our remit is very broad. We act as ideas brokers - bringing together healthcare professionals, researchers, business leaders and policy makers to generate good ideas.

We’ve also been helping many complementary therapists become regulated so people who do choose to use their services can have confidence that they are visiting someone responsible and appropriately qualified.

Above all, we’d like to focus public debate on the way that the nature of ill-health has changed in the last 100 years – most people now suffer from chronic, long-term illness rather than short acute bouts of disease. We need a 21st Century approach to health to catch up with our changing society.
 

Turquoise Mountain: two years on

Posted 19th May 2008 15:23pm

By Rory Stewart, Chief Executive of Turquoise Mountain

The Prince of Wales and President Karzai established the Turquoise Mountain in late January 2006. I moved to Kabul a week later to set up the foundation. By the end of the month, we had rented the empty front room of a tailoring shop and hired one employee.

In 2008, we have over 250 staff. We have brought services, a clinic and a school to the community of Murad Khane (the old city area where we work), restored over 50 historic buildings, held international exhibitions and sold Afghan art on three continents. We have cleared 8000 trucks of garbage out of the old city, dropping the street level by seven feet and creating near total employment for every unemployed adult male in the area. We had 550 applicants for 30 places this year in our Institute. The Institute is now established as Afghanistan’s leading arts and crafts school, and we have been asked by the Minister of Education to redevelop other craft vocational schools in Kabul.

Only a year ago, odds seemed heavily against us. The old city was still scheduled for demolition, in line with a 1976 East German masterplan. Landlords were reluctant to let us repair their houses. Craft exports were crippled by logistical problems and high costs. Our tiny management team were young short-term volunteers. It was almost impossible to persuade architects or craftsmen to move to Kabul. At one point, we were within three weeks of running out of our money.

Now there is real confidence and energy. Each time I return from a trip I find a dozen unexpected and successful innovations. The Afghan government has registered the Institute and put a protection order on Murad Khane. The Canadian government has committed three million dollars to the project.

On each street corner in the old city, a thousand daily interactions combine trade and religion, public space and private space, female shoppers and traditional craft producers. Development in this neighbourhood and in the testing conditions of Afghanistan requires flexible funding procedures and managers who take quick decisions, are tolerant of risk, and support broad and comprehensive programs. These are difficult in an aid context increasingly dominated by bureaucracy, metrics, international committees and theory.

But they are not impossible.

We have succeeded in part because of The Prince of Wales, who pursued an opportunity in an environment which would have intimidated most international donors. He was prepared to trust the people on the ground and combine immediate private funding with longer-term government support.

We have been able to draw on the examples and knowledge of The Prince’s Foundation for the Built Environment, The Young Business Leaders Forum, The Prince’s Trust and The Prince’s School for Traditional Arts, and combine their different approaches in a single place with a single community. These diverse groups share a common confidence in historic communities, arts and cities, in culture as a transformative tool and in the practical importance of livelihoods, business and sustainability. This confidence is vital for Kabul.

But the real lesson of the last two years has been a lesson in humility. Insofar as we have survived and prospered, it has been because we have listened to our Afghan colleagues and the community of Murad Khane, and have been guided by their preferences and their solutions. Their know-how, tested by experience, has an agility, a power and a legitimacy which no foreign programme can match.
 

The story of In Kind Direct

Posted 19th May 2008 15:14pm by Robin Boles

By Robin Boles, Chief Executive of In Kind Direct

It was the waste of perfectly good products which inspired The Prince of Wales to ask me – Robin Boles - to set up In Kind Direct. Eleven years later, his idea has been transformed into a successful, innovative charity which is making a huge difference to the fortunes of thousands of voluntary and community groups, and the millions of people they serve.

We offer a unique partnership between business and the voluntary sector.

Since 1997, 750 companies, including many household names, have donated £70million worth of their products and over 5,000 charities have benefited. And because an estimated seventy Olympic-sized swimming pools-full of surplus goods have been saved from landfill, the environment has benefited too.

By offering charities the goods they and the people they serve need, In Kind Direct helps them make their money go much further, leaving more for their core activities.

In Kind Direct gives manufacturers and retailers an efficiently run single point of contact through which their goods can be distributed to charities all over the country, and by proving that in-kind giving can be a serious alternative to landfill, we help companies fulfil their corporate, social and environmental responsibilities. This also results in employees’ morale being boosted by seeing their companies’ creative solution to surplus help all kinds of good causes and people in need.

Because In Kind Direct supports charities of every type and size, we can redistribute a huge range of household and office products. It might be cleaning supplies, office equipment and tools for an employment training organisation; toiletries, bedding, toys, nappies, toilet rolls and books for a women’s shelter or emergency relief charity; toiletries, shoes and clothes for a homelessness group; kettles, toasters and china for a charity housing refugees, or games software, arts and crafts materials and sporting goods for youth groups in deprived areas.

This redistributive approach touches very much on current business values which focus on sustainability and good corporate governance.

Charities only pay a handling charge for our service which is a fraction of the value of the goods they receive. Over half of our charity partners have an income of less than £50,000 so our leveraging effect makes a real difference to their ability to continue to help people in need.

It has been great fun to start and substantially grow a charity inspired by The Prince of Wales, and certainly challenging at times. Helping companies meet their corporate, social and environmental goals while reducing landfill is very important. And hearing so many of our charity partners explain that they couldn’t exist without us, makes it especially rewarding.