Music for education & wellbeing podcast [45] TRANSCRIPT: Adam Joolia, Audio Active

AH: Hello, it’s Anita here, and welcome to this month’s podcast. In this episode, I’m talking with Adam Joolia, CEO of Audio Active, a Sussex based charity that uses music as a tool for social change, education and personal development. When I last interviewed Adam around 15 years ago, the organisation was tiny, but punching above its weight, and now the organisation has grown and is commissioned by a range of health and social commissioners to support outcomes for young people. It’s an Arts Council of England national portfolio organisation, which for international listeners, means it’s core funded, in this case, with a grant of £300,000 a year. It also recently received a 2 million pound grant from another holy grail, the Youth Endowment Fund, to study the impact of its one to one mentoring programme for young people who’ve offended or are at risk of offending. So welcome Adam, after all these 15 years since we last had an official interview, it’s really lovely to have you on the podcast.

AJ: Hi Anita, thanks for having me here.

AH: So things are going really well for Audio Active, it sounds like, and you seem to be bucking the trend that’s seeing most youth music and music education organisations really struggling. So I’m interested to sort of know how you’ve got to where you are today, basically, but perhaps I should start with just asking you to describe what Audio Active does.

AJ: Sure. So as you mentioned in the intro, lovely intro, thanks for that. Audio Active is a music organisation, first and foremost. We’re a registered charity, and as you said, we do focus on social change and developing young people in more than just music capacities. I’d say equally, we focus on grassroots talent development and beyond that sort of routes into industry, whether that’s as creators and artists or as people who want to work in the jobs that surround the creative roles. And we have got a whole heap of projects across those kind of three work strands. Well, I’d say grassroots talent development, social change and fair industries and routes into work. And all of the projects, I call them, sort of families of projects. Everything is free to attend. A lot of it happens outside of school and the office day kind of times so that it’s accessible for young people, young adults. And we are spread mostly across Brighton and Hove, Worthing, which is in West Sussex, and Crawley, which is getting up towards mid Sussex. We kind of spread out a little bit further than that. The idea, really is that, because we kind of started off in Brighton, Brighton and Hove, and in terms of the artist development and achievements there that young people have had, the critical acclaim they’ve had, is largely happened through Brighton programme. But what we’re aiming at really, we feel that if the opportunities that we offered were equal in our three sort of main towns, then we’ll also start seeing similar success stories coming out of Crawley, similar success stories coming out of Worthing. So that’s kind of what we’re focused on at the moment. And just sort of in answer to your question, the kind of projects in our social change family of projects are all using music, but to solve some quite difficult problems in young people’s and young adults lives and in communities. So we’ve got Room to Rant, which is a rap based mental health support project for young men. We’ve got Vocalise, which is a vocal work and wellbeing project for young women. When I say young men and young women, I also include those identifying as young men and young women, gender variant individuals. And we’ve got Shift which you touched on there, which is our one to one mentoring program for 11 to 17 year olds who are on the peripheries of or [at] risk being drawn into criminality and serious youth violence. And then the grassroots talent development projects are the stuff which you’ll see above the radar, really, and that we’re kind of probably best known for, is the bread and butter of what we do, which is mostly kind of semi structured, drop in sessions across music production, recording, songwriting, rap and lyric writing, basically anything to do with music creation, which is weeknights, free to attend, and it’s artist led. You just show up. There’s kit there, there’s artists there who can help and say what you want to do that week. And it’s pretty youth led in that respect that we’re not putting on courses most of the time, it’s not accredited or curriculum based. And then with our sort of fairer industries and World of Work strands that’s more focused around young adults who want to earn money. We’ve got Full Circle, which is a young leadership training programme. And out of about 40 music leaders that we’ve got at the moment on our books, about half of them came up through Full Circle over the last 12-13 years.

AH: That’s amazing.

AJ: I mean, it’s great. I mean, we’re growing our own leaders here, and they’re becoming leaders in more than just a music leader way. But also on the creative side, we’ve got Emerge, which is our artist development programme for 18 to 25 year olds, which takes on about a dozen quite exciting emerging artists every year and brings them together as a cohort and gives them lots of industry support to get their early careers to the next level. And most recently, we’ve launched, it’s a burgeoning social enterprise called MXTR, which is the record label and platform, and that’s really just looking to flip the major record label model on its head and give radically high cuts and record deals to the most exciting emerging artists that we work with, and hopefully earn them lots of money from their work. Whistle Stop tour there.

AH: That’s amazing. You’ve had a lot of success with that artist development, actually, haven’t you, and I think that’s what you mentioned you are known for. And that started to happen right back when, when we were in touch last time, which was, I seem to remember, it was Rizzle Kicks at the time, that had risen through your ranks. And you’ve had quite a few other people who’ve become really well known in the music industry since and made successful careers. I don’t know if you want to plug any of them?

AJ: Yeah, for sure, but yeah, you’re quite right. Rizzle Kicks, they got involved about the age of 13. They were involved for four or five years initially. Even after they got signed, they were still coming along to some projects, and they’re still quite heavily involved as patrons of the charity. But since then, we’ve had some others. ArrDee was one, sort of one of the more recent ones, and other artists who have gone on to win BBC Sound of…. I think two years in a row BBC Sound of… winners were young creators who come up through Audio Active. I say, come up, the extent to which they were involved ranges massively, and whilst ArrDee was very heavily involved for a few years and across few different projects, people like Celeste was just like one touch point in a in a competition we ran for a support act. And when Rizzle Kicks did a benefit gig, and similarly, Octavian, who was the BBC Sound of… winner the year before Celeste, he popped up three or four times. And when he used to come down to come down to Brighton, he always passed through Audio Active with friends and got involved in some projects. But I think that we had varying sort of involvement in being parts of their journey. Rag ‘N’ Bone Man, who’s a patron still, he still is a patron. I would say it wasn’t really so much as a beneficiary, but he was a friend of a lot of the artists, some who kind of mentored him more in a personal capacity, and as they’re sort of artists in the scene, as opposed to with Audio Active. But Rory, Rag ‘N’ Bone Man that is, is still fully behind us, and in the background there, sort of pulling some strings and helping where he can. And all of these people have just been really, I think, you know, you wanted to get into a bit about how we’ve survived and thrived in such a difficult time. I think they’ve been part of the story massively.

AH: When I interviewed you last time, you were doing really impactful work already, but you were struggling to be seen. So tell me a little bit more about that. What do you think has helped you to kind of get what you do seen, valued and funded.

AJ: It’s a mixture of things. I think consistency is one of the big ones. Like it’s been several times where we could have given up and packed it all in, or maybe should have done, actually, in terms of if we had been far more established then and managed risks in a more rigorous way, I suspect that we might have been in some more difficult situations than we’d realised. But the fact that we just kept going, I would put that in the top three. I can’t lie. I mean, the people we just mentioned, who became patrons, I think played a big role, not that they gave us loads of money. I think it’s more that they helped us to become more trusted as an organisation. Sometimes in our sector, and I’m sure a lot of people working in the youth music funded and the community music sector would relate to this is that sometimes, I think that funders outside of people like Arts Council and Youth Music don’t fully understand, necessarily, the full impact of this kind of work. And sometimes could be forgiven for assuming that we don’t have as much impact as, say, direct Youth Work models, or you’ve really got to sit and have these kind of conversations before you fully deep dive into what’s going on and how much impact it has. But I think that, you know, the endorsement of people like Rag ‘N’ Bone Man and some of the films that we made with him really acted as a trust multiplier to the organisation, which increased the success rate of funding bids. And then, with regards to sort of being seen, the reach and the PR off the back of some of that stuff with the patrons helped. But it’s also about having something important to say if you do get that reach. And a few years back, we started looking at trying to strengthen our evidence base much more so, rather than having a bunch of really enthusiastic colleagues singing and shouting from the rooftops about our impacts and some really good case studies, it’s about having that external validation, trying to build evaluations into projects and, you know, budgeting for those so that it’s someone else out there, perhaps with a more impartial perspective and a more trusted voice saying that what we’re doing actually works. We’ve seen that with Room to Rant, the mental health project I mentioned, getting funding from people like the Wellcome Trust to fund proper evaluations with academics and the reports that have come out of that, and when commissioners ask us the question, that’s all great, and the reputation is great, but where’s the real evidence that they’re the kind of things that we’re able to put our hands on now.

AH: That’s really fascinating. And can we delve a little bit into that? Because I know that there are lots of organisations that are doing brilliant work, similar work to the type of work you do, but really, really struggle with evidencing impact, and particularly in the way that commissioners are used to. So you mentioned to me, when we spoke briefly before this podcast, that in the early days when you started to be commissioned by health and social care, you actually didn’t have a robust evaluation framework, and that always seems to be what people think is needed. But actually it’s just simply knowing where to start, what tools to use, and who can help you best, because often there isn’t money around for external evaluation in those early stages. So just interest, interested in how you started?

AJ: Yeah, my eyes opened a little bit because I think I probably attended a workshop about theory of change, and obviously that’s a whole very well established way of thinking and strategic planning and doing things and showing a linear relationship between activities and impact with success indicators and short, medium and long term outcomes in between those two things. And I think it was when we started speaking that language of theory of change, and being able to talk to commissioners and funders about that logic model progression between the activity, what small change that affects, how those can add up to a bigger effect, and that would be what I used to be able to go in and talk to service heads and commissioners outside of the traditional funding structures to, just to basically give them a bit of confidence that we were thinking about the impact. And rather than just going we know what we want to do. We know where the gaps are. We don’t see why we have to package all of this up in in terms of what that’s going to look like in terms of change in the next three to four years. And again, I think it speaks to that confidence issue that commissioners and non-traditional community music funders and wellbeing funders have in how professionally they think you’re set up. I do think that there’s a potential issue in our sector that we have to work possibly twice as hard to give commissioners and funders the same trust in our work because we’re musicians, and in our case, because we are working mostly around black music and underground music and some of the stereotypes and possible unconscious bias that we see around these genres and forms of music. It’s not necessarily a natural and easy bedfellow with very professional settings or really airtight safeguarding, or like a really strong governance I think sometimes people just assume that because we work in the mediums we do, that those things I just mentioned might somehow not be as rigorous.

AH: Yeah, absolutely. I think nowadays, because of all the work that Youth Music has done, and other bodies, community music organisations are so well versed in all of that now, and they have all those policies, but maybe sometimes actually forget to talk about it with commissioners. So theory of change sort of started to change the way you were talking about the work. Did you invest time from your senior leadership to kind of work out your own theory of change? Is that what started it off?

AJ: Not really, I would say that, so at the time, I was the only senior leadership in the organisation. Secondly, we didn’t then have the resources to bring anyone else in to help us structure that thinking. Or in fact, to this day, we still don’t really have a single theory of change that covers Audio Active as an organisation. We’ve got a couple of a few different theory of changes which are project and programme specific. But I just kind of did what I could, to be honest. I like spreadsheets, and I basically came up with a way I got, I got the loose concept of what theory of change was, and really I just took away from that session, oh, it’s a way of being able to strategic plan in the long term, by starting in five years’ time and what that big impact change looks like, and then saying, Okay, but what, what are the smaller changes that add up to make that big impact change? Okay, and once you’ve got each of those, let’s call it three or four outcomes, the smaller changes. What are the success in three or four success indicators that add up to make one of those outcomes and just working the way back retro planning back to the final bit being, All right, what’s the activity you need to run to bring about that success indicator? We just used it as a way of strategic planning first and foremost. The way that I was doing it, a theory of change expert probably would have looked at and gone, this has got some holes in it. However, it worked for us at the time, and I think it was just about diving in and doing something.

AH: Interesting. Was that theory of change influenced by the kind of policy initiatives and the outcomes that were being talked about at that time, or in any time since, because I noticed you talk about routes into work, and I can’t remember the phrase you use, but I thought, ah, that skills agenda is really important at the moment, and for any arts organisation working with young people, that’s the type of language you need to be talking. So do you think that you either naturally or strategically look for those policy initiatives or steers?

AJ: Yes, I do. I think that, and this really feeds into the overarching question of, how have you managed to survive and do quite well against a backdrop where the general travel, direction of travel is the opposite. I think that the work, if you were to come and sit in a workshop or a one to one session, the actual activity that we do with young people would look pretty much the same, albeit maybe run by more experienced people, because we’ve done it more than it did maybe 10-15 years ago. But I feel that the way that we package it up and describe it and talk about it, and, of course, evaluate it is the thing that changes. And what we’ve been fairly successful at is taking the activity that we know is really engaging young people well, and we know how that works for them and what they get out of it, but being able to repackage it in a relevant way to what the strategic directives being handed down by government, local authority, media are, and I think that has been the trick. To be honest with you, I got into this line of work just over 20 years ago, through youth work and through alternative education, working with young people who’ve been permanently excluded from school. I didn’t realise it until recently, but I think when I trained as a youth worker, I was probably in the golden what was the golden age of youth work as far as funding goes. There were a couple of 100 youth workers and six or eight senior youth workers spread across Nottingham, mostly statutory funded. There was so much more investment in young people. But my point is that I feel, since all of that’s been stripped away through austerity and since the economic downturn, like a lot of the youth clubs have gone, a lot of statutory youth work completely disappeared. The work that we’re doing, maybe I should say the statutory money work that we’re doing is still there. It’s just called violence reduction or public health, and the work we’re covering with it is very much the same. So yeah, I think it’s about being agile and being switched on to what the current, I was going to say for want of a better term, but actually, if I’m really honest, what the current buzzwords are, and then how you can, in a really true and authentic way, without spin, still be able to describe what you do within those contexts.

AH: And how have you managed to do that Adam? Do you think you’re naturally inclined to be able to pick up on that? Or have you had any training? I’m just thinking from people listening to this and thinking, oh we really struggle with that type of thing. Have you got any recommendations?

AJ: I do think it’s a mixture of both. I feel like when I really boil down what I’m good at, one of the top two or three things is making connections between real world and what’s on the horizon or strategy or current issues, I’m really good at joining dots. But I would add that the best training that I ever had, I think, which really stays with me is from when I worked with Creative Partnerships. I worked as a creative agent, and Creative Partnerships basically was a big initiative, national government funded initiative that gave schools money, and it gave them a project manager who’s managed by Creative Partnerships to basically run these kind of experiments in schools to see how working with a creative practitioner of any discipline within creative industries. So it could be an architect, or it could be a rapper, put them in partnership with a teacher, alongside a teacher in classrooms, and including young people as an equal partner in that triangle, to explore how gleaning stuff from that practitioner’s creative process and some of the ideas they might bring to a classroom challenge can improve teaching and learning in that school. So it wasn’t about art projects in schools. It was about in our case, I’ll give you a real life example. If we handed over one of our literacy hours per week in the curriculum to a couple of rappers, how might that improve confidence with literacy in a way that we’d see results, improvements in our expected SATs. But my point is, sorry, I’m going off on a tangent, that the training we got there was about how creativity works, and I did our school, and at no point in my sort of limited arts education did anyone teach us what created, what constitutes creativity, which I felt really weird, because it was like being enlightened at 25 and learning all of this, but they were teaching things about taking risks, making associations, the curiosity side, challenging convention, all of these different traits, and they’re the things that were drilled into us. And stay with me for this day. And then the other thing was, how can you put creative practice into an equation that’s trying to solve a problem that’s not really associated with the arts or creativity. And that’s the thing that I took away from Creative Partnerships. The legacy of Creative Partnerships, I feel really lives on through projects like Room to Rant, because we were basically entrusting creative practitioners to achieve outcomes that had nothing to do with the world of arts or creativity, and they were equal partners in those projects, and they worked. Yes, in answer to your question, it was partly training, but also one of my embedded kind of strengths is about joining up dots.

AH: In a sense, it makes me think that you’re applying your reflective practitioner skills as well as your creative skills to the challenges of your organisation. So that whole thing about having those antennae out for these policy initiatives and what’s next on the horizon, that’s kind of you need to be reflective to do that, and you need to be creative, don’t you? So when people running organisations like yours, or project managers in organisations like yours are sort of struggling with these challenges, actually, they’re the best people to be able to sort of solve them, because they do have those instincts, those reflective instincts, and those creative instincts perhaps?

AJ: Yeah, 100%. Sure, it’s funny, because, as you were saying that, I think that the other thing to really not forget to include in that mix is integrity. Basically, if you’re good at what you just described, you’re constantly going to be coming up with ideas for new ideas of how to solve a problem. But I’ve been part of many a funding bid that I’ve got halfway through, and thought, Mmm, I’m having to lay it on a little bit thick here, I don’t think it’s right to submit this or pursue this idea any further, because it’s you kind of got to the point where actually it did start to feel a little bit more like spin. So yeah, never forget the integrity bit, because the better you get at, let’s call it packaging up what you do, but with different narratives. I think the more you’re going to be presented with situations where you’re like, actually, this this one, it might be a bit tentative.

AH: That’s such an important point, such a good point. Because I often think that people think that if you’re packaging something up for Health and Social Care commissioners, that you are spinning. So I get that because I’m comms practitioner, a little bit of suspicion that I’m going to cause people to be all inauthentic. And absolutely, you know, I would never do that, because of the sector I work in, because of what I care about. And the same for people like you. So from where you were getting together, that theory of change beginning to talk in the way that commissioners of your work might understand to where you are now. You’re now funded by the Youth Endowment Fund, and that is just simply amazing. So I don’t know if you want to tell me a little bit about how you got to that point and then about the Youth Endowment Fund.

AJ: Yeah. I’ll go quickly with this one, because if I think about the full journey, we’re going back probably 14 years, 15 years, but it had Youth Music at the start of it, who got in touch with us one day and said we’re piloting this program called Youth Music Mentors. It’s been running for a year or two already, but we haven’t done anything in your region. Would you consider applying? We applied and it was successful. And we ran a programme for a couple of years which basically developed a model for one to one mentoring, using music. From that we took, carried that over into the work we were doing with Youth Offending teams, and we helped them to apply for funding from Youth Music and other places to do one to one work. So yeah, 2017-2018, public health put out a tender in Brighton and Hove for people to propose a programme of diversionary activities that would help divert young people away from what they were saying ‘risky behaviours’, and what they meant by these at the time was young people who were basically smoking too much weed and at risk of that crossing over into drug supply and or young people who were at risk of unwanted pregnancies and who were known to sort of be engaging in risky sexual behaviours. And again, there it was, it was a perfect opportunity to repackage something that we were already doing into it or different outcomes. And we proposed a series of one to one mentoring with basically on a trusted relationship model with an adult would sort of build protective factors into their life, that if and when they came across really risky situations or crossroads in their lives or decisions to make, that they might confide in someone who might be able to give them some sound advice. And it was kind of that simple, really. So that was 2017-2018 and then when violence reduction partnerships came along, and Crawley Borough Council got in touch with us and said, Can you do anything with us in this context? And we said, well, funnily enough, we’ve just started operating what started to become known as Shift with the one to one mentoring. And actually the theory of change we were using there is very much the outcomes that we’d be aiming for that we’d argue would be relevant outcomes to protect young people from getting involved in serious youth violence. So that was commissioned in Crawley in 2018, and was re-commissioned on an annual basis through violence reduction partnerships every year, up until we just started working with YEF, but that formed the basis, and around that, we were getting commissioned by Brighton and Hove for violence reduction and a little bit in East Sussex as well. So Shift grew organically to the scale that we could then start to be being seen by Youth Endowment Fund as a possible partner for one of their evaluations. And anyone out there listening who doesn’t know about Youth Endowment Fund, they were set up with a 200 million pound endowment from the Home Office specifically to reduce youth violence. And their approach was, find out what works, build an evidence base around it, and then help it to scale. And their approach, they said, We want to go down the gold standard of evaluation, being quantitative and being randomised control trials. And in order to run a randomised control trial, you have to have a large sample group, because if you only do it with 40 or 50 people, it’s not enough data to iron out the anomalies. So you have to do it with, in our case, 600 or 800 people. And I suppose that’s how we got there. What we learned through the process of working with YEF is we’re one of the only people working at that kind of scale to be able to base an RCT on.

AH: Oh, that’s really interesting. So how many young people do you work with per year, and how many young people for that particular youth mentoring programme?

AJ: In terms of young people who engage more than three or four times with what we do it’s around a 1,000. Then you’ve got a load of young people who might only come once or twice to open sessions, and then you’ve got young people who just come to gigs. And so I think looking at recent figures, it was between 2000 and 3000 and in that year, it probably would have been about 180 or 200 in one to one music mentoring and then, with regards to the YEF programme, over the course of two years, we have to get 800 referrals. But because it’s an RCT, 50% of those referrals are randomised into a control group who don’t get Shift. 50%, say 400 or so get randomised into the, what the researchers call the treatment group, who do get Shift, and that’s over two years, so similar, about 200 per year on the one to one mentoring program.

AH: Right, okay, so you’ve had to ramp up your activity to get more young people in for that?

AJ: We’ve had to ramp up referrals, yeah. I’d say that in terms of the engagement of people who do get Shift, we were getting close to that number already through four or five separate contracts in different areas for Shift. But we didn’t have to get twice the number of referrals in order to get those people. So yeah, we have had to really, really build up the team. And to be honest with you, I mean, you mentioned the 2 million pounds. Just to be clear, that 2 million is also including the researchers budget as well. Our part is closer to 1.6 million, which is still a hell of a lot of money and a good four to five times more expensive per head to do a randomised control trial than if we were delivering it on a commission basis without that evaluation. And the reasons for that is you have to build up so much infrastructure to guarantee what the researchers call fidelity. There’s a hell of a lot of training to make sure that the wide team of mentors are delivering a very similar experience, because if young people are having different experiences, then you don’t have that consistency of data, the data could be flawed. All of these other areas that we’ve had to think about building up the infrastructure of the programme management team and the staff team to guarantee that young people have that there’s no huge disparities in the amount of time that it takes for young person to get seen after referral. Because again, if there’s inconsistencies there, then it floors the data. It’s so deep and complex, but one of the amazing things about it was that once we’d had the initial decision that we were going to be funded, you then go into a co-design stage with the evaluators, and we actually spent five months really scrutinising the theory of change, making sure it’s airtight, thinking about all of the different workflows and processes and everything right down to a tee, so that by the time you come to start the project, everything’s completely planned out so well and so rigorously. And also it gives us, as the provider, the chance to turn around to the researchers and say, actually, you know what, I don’t think that approach is going to work. Or I think maybe if we get too many surveys too often, then it’s going to alienate young people or change the nature of the work and its impact. And these are the things that you don’t normally get the chance to do when you team up with academics. My experience in the past has been, the academic will come and say, here’s the methodology. This is what we have to do in order to get the distance traveled and the statistically significant outcomes. So by the end of the five months, it’s been through so many kind of tests and opportunities for us to fine tune it. And even then, when that’s been signed off and you push the button, we have four, five months of work to build the partnerships out there, to mobilise, to do the training, to train people in local authorities, to sort of help to oversee the control groups. So it was a good 10 months of work before we even did a face to face mentoring session.

AH: It sounds like a seriously important piece of research for the sector, not just in terms of the results to sort of show about the impact of music, but also to act as a model for music sector, working with academics in that way, as you said, more equitably. It sounds fantastic. When will the research be out? Is it a few years yet?

AJ: So at the moment, we’re coming towards the end of the first six months of face to face delivery, which is seen as a pilot. And during that six months, we have to prove that we can get enough referrals that they can be seen quick enough that the data quality is right. And if we get them progressed onto the full efficacy study from May through to September 2026 will be the main part of the study. We’ll finish face to face delivery in autumn 2026 and then I’m guessing there’s a whole load of data crunching, which is probably six or eight months. So it’s going to be early 2027 until the draft kind of reports and evaluations. This is my guess. And then I think once that exists, then for it to be a proper report, does it need peer reviewing? So it could be late 2027, early 2028 I’m assuming, before that sort of solid report is published. But you mentioned about the significance of that kind of evidence in the sector. Yeah. I mean, if this was just about us putting more evidence behind Shift, we wouldn’t be doing an RCT. It’s come with a whole load of challenges for us, which we knew we were getting into. But just to be clear, the 400 young people that we will refer into the programme won’t get Shift. I mean, it all has to go through ethics boards, so it’s not unethical in that sense. But there is some definite professional discomfort with us as an organisation, who are used to being able to give young people whatever they want to do, and the reason why we have accepted that that’s okay is that (A), the researchers weren’t able to find any quantitative, strong evidence that music mentoring in this way does work or not, that there are any studies out there showing quantitative evidence. And (B), you know, yes, I think if we can get the proof that it works, then it means that we’re more likely to be able to keep Shift going, and more young people are going to be able to get it for a long time to come. But I think that that, on its own, might not have been enough for us to go, Yeah, we’re willing to do this that half the young people get it and half don’t. I think the crunch for us, and the thing that we keep reminding ourselves of, is that if this study shows that it works, then hopefully that’s something that any youth music funded organisation across the country who’s doing one to one mentoring for young people can pick up and take to their commissioners and say, Here’s the evidence, give us the investment. I think that that’s the short term pain that we’re going through, hopefully for some long term gain and because there’s just such a lack of evidence.

AH: So we’ll wait a few years, but really look forward to reading the results of that. And will you be releasing any information in the interim, any interim findings, or anything like that?

AJ: TBC. There’s a little bit of caution about sharing some of the distance travel stuff before the study is finished, purely, I guess, because, for the same reason that you need a big sample group, if we start showing patterns based on fractions of a sample group, they might not be accurate. So we will be releasing some sort of more anecdotal updates.

AH: And we’ve all got loads of qual evidence, haven’t we, and that’s one of the kind of complaints from music sectors. We know this stuff works. We have the qualitative evidence, but it often isn’t enough. So hopefully, by having that quant evidence, it’ll get more people to pay attention to the qualitative stuff. You seem like an organisation that has a growth plan, but you mentioned to me recently that that isn’t the case at all. So what are the next steps for Audio Active?

AJ: I think it’s consolidating, finishing off. I feel like we’ve been in the process of professionalisation for the last four or five years. Before that, it was purely firefighting and trying not to close. And since things have become a little bit more predictable, and we’ve got a bit more security, you mentioned, we’ve got core funding, which is transformational, and we’ve actually been able to sort of look at the things that sit behind the work, look at the back office, what a lot of people might sort of think of as the really boring stuff, the systems that allow us to be able to work at a scale, the governance, the, you know, the financial management, all of these things are things that we’ve been able to now start getting really airtight. It’s funny, because I feel like, as you do, then you suddenly become bit more of a safe pair of hands for funders, and you’re able to get larger grants. These are the things, I don’t think the things that stop organisations being able to get large grants are a lack of ideas. I think the ideas coming out of smaller organisations, to be honest, tend to be more innovative and groundbreaking. But no, we don’t have a growth plan. I’m very keen that we don’t just keep growing. The growth to date has not been because we’ve been trying to grow. I think some of it has been that some of the ideas we had were bigger than we were, and we needed to grow a bit to, for example, get a building and to be seen as secure enough to be able to maintain a building and for those kind of ideas to work. But the growth has been more organic, I think, largely down to having a good reputation and good relationships in the sector, across criminal justice, community safety, place and economy has been an important part in that as far as councils are concerned. So no, it’s definitely not an endless growth mission. I feel that the reason why the voluntary sector is so good is because it’s made up of so many small, amazing organisations that each have their own little niche. And actually a lot of the people who fall through the cracks, you can’t expect that any one organisation, no matter how good they are, is going to be able to look after everyone. Everyone’s got their own little isms and nuances, and I think it takes a whole spectrum of small, deeply rooted organisations to be able to do that, so I’m very cautious of growth. And I guess the plan is more around how do we hold on to our essence and our small organisation energy in this new kind of scale that we have. That’s my caution.

AH: Yeah, and a nice challenge to have. And that brings me on to my final question, which is to invite you to share either three practical pieces of advice for others working in the sector, or three calls to action, things that you’d like to see happen in this area in the next few years.

AJ: I always get a bit of a mental block when I get asked questions like that. I guess the pieces of advice are, it’s all about your people. And I’ve come up through this job. When I started, I was the only member of staff, and now we have about 17 salaried members of staff and a handful of freelance kind of office team, and then about three quarters of our music leader team are freelance as well. I think it’s really about taking the people development part of it really, really seriously, and never acting against your kind of instinct. Say, for instance, a colleague leaves and you need to get a new person in that post. Don’t be scared to not recruit that if, if you don’t feel like you found the person, because the points where Audio Active has gone from A to B or from D to F, that’s been based on people who really brought something that we didn’t know we needed. And people who could do that certain part of the job that we were recruiting to better than I ever could. So I think it’s always about not compromising on the development of your people or team. Second one, and I guess it feeds into some of because if I was listening to this 10 years ago, I’d be listening to what I just said and went, Yeah, but you don’t know it’s like to not be able to afford an admin person for half a day a week. I do know what that’s like, and I can remember it. And so secondly, my second one would be get really good at financial forecasting, because there have been the moments where we’ve been able to take a risk and make a decision to spend some money that was cash flow in the bank on increasing the capacity that we’ve got in the team. Let me just say we’ve never had money until sort of 2018, 2019, we never had money, specifically with a grant for a job, every single salary, fundraising bid or core funding rate raising bid that we wrote between about 2006 and 2016 was unsuccessful, and that’s why we didn’t create the extra jobs that we needed. When we created those jobs, it was as a risk decision of like, well, we’ve got this amount of money in the bank, and we’re going to need it in a year’s time, but if we create this extra job and that would then start paying for itself, or that the money would come back in because of the work we’re doing, or freeing me up to do some more development work. Every single time we’ve made a decision like that, it paid off, and it took a real leap of faith, but that would be my second bit of advice. If you’ve got the cash flow tools and the forecasting tools, you can see when you can make those kind of decisions with some level of confidence. And a third one, I think really, it’s just don’t put all your eggs in one basket, spread your work and your projects out across several sectors. Like for us, at times when youth work didn’t have any money, that’s when we were able to be getting money out of youth justice. When schools didn’t have any money, that’s when we were being able to get money out of public health. And all of these sectors have cycles of not having any money. But if you sort of say, well, actually we operate in the public health sector, youth justice, community safety, youth work, arts development, place and economy, then usually there’s a little bit of income to be found, I would say, in at least a couple of the sectors that you’re spread across. And that suits the way that things change in the narrative of politics and media, and kind of allows you to be a bit more agile. How many is that,  have I done three there?

AH: You have. Did you want to do another one? Or …

AJ: No, I’ll leave it there, I think. I suppose the conversation’s kind of taken quite a theme around resilience. I guess of if I do any more I might swerve off into a completely different topic.

AH: Well, they’re really interesting, and some unexpected pieces of advice, financial forecasting, not something that I’m quite interested in, but I know how important it is so and it can free you up and enable your creativity. So we’ve come to the end of our time, and I can’t tell you what a pleasure it’s been Adam. Thank you so much for making the time, and best of luck with all that you’re doing.

AJ: Thank you. I’ve really enjoyed it as well. And yeah, just to be clear, I mean, there’s stuff around finances, I had to boil it all down. Sweat the boring stuff and the really interesting stuff tends to fall into place.

AH: Good piece of advice to end on. Thanks again, Adam. Thanks ever so much.

AJ: All right, thanks Anita. Bye.