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As founder and Chief Executive of the innovative Ladder to the Moon - a community-focussed interactive theatre company - I got hands on experience in how to develop organisations - and occassionally how not to! Then, on the Clore Cultural Leadership programme I got to meet and learn from some of the great arts leaders of our time - and to put that in to practice working with the Senior Managment Team at the Royal Albert Hall. I led the executive team in a visioning exercise, establishing a clarity of values and objectives for the organisation to use as a basis for moving forward. All this experience has brought me to the firm belief that organisations and projects work best when those working in them are clear and united about the values, direction and goals - and the narrative that holds them together. My philosophy is to help organisations find and tell their own story in a way that can bring them the rewards they are looking for.
Vision and Mission are simply ways of expressing what the company wants to achieve and what it stands for. I work with organisations to first look at how their company is currently seen from the inside and the outside - what are the stories that are told about it? I then help them to look at what they wish the story of their organisation to be - what they really stand for and what they really want to achieve. We then work on how they can communicate that story to staff, trustees, stakeholders and service users.
As Chief Executive of Ladder to the Moon with sole responsibility for fundraising, I kept the company afloat for five years - and indeed grants continued to come in after I left. The majority of this was through trusts and foundations, although a significant portion was also from various local government sources. For me, fundraising is an exercise in telling the story of how the project will meet its target community's needs - and then finding a funder who share's that stories values. It's as simple and as complex as that!
The interactive and young people's theatre work I make is notoriously difficult to evaluate and so, over the years, I've developed innovative methods to capture and, where necessary, quantify the unquantifiable - without losing the essence of work. My favourite example is employing a 'smile counter' to count the number of smiles they saw my interactive characters create - best job in the world! I also create coding systems to find a way to compile the free responses to projects that young people might give through graffiti walls, diary room recordings etc. Evaluation is, for me, about tellling the story of what happened, and, where appropriate, finding numbers that help that story make more sense to people who need to hear it.
If you would like to talk about a potential project, or discuss any of these strands of organisational development further, then please do contact me on justine@sowhatsthestory.co.uk.
You can also click here to download my Developing Organisations CV. I'm in the process of updating this CV, so until I've got it up on the website, please see the News & Events page for more recent work, and do contact me direct if you'd like a more updated version
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Developing Organisations
