David Forrester
DF: David Forrester
INT: Interviewer
INT: Say who you are.
DF: I’m David Forrester and Chairman of Rosetta. I’ve been involved with it for 8 years now. When I joined Rosetta, I was phoned up by a very persuasive young lady, and she said I’ve been told to get in touch with cos you might be able to help me with a body that I’m responsible for in Newham. It’s a borough, hope you’ve heard of it. Oh yes, I know, I am a Londoner. And I’m very committed to it. I need someone to help me set up an advisory board, to help me with this small organisation, social enterprise company that I as the Director of and run, and it’s grown out of a commitment to Newham, to devolve its adult education in the arts, to a body that is outside of the local authority, but works with the Adult Education Service and I need to strengthen that. Will you come along and have a conversation? I said of course, I’d be delighted to.
It turned out that she has been a student at Barcelona, the international business school there – RAC with someone I knew quite well, that I’d worked with in the association of further education colleges (further education) when I’d been a civil servant of education, and I’d also been a consultant working in Egypt with the Department of African Development and Des supported me and helped me on that, and I bought him in on that. We had an interesting day riding camels around the pyramids of Giza, and on the back of that he said I was obviously the chap that was needed to help this small body. So, I came in and Sanaz and I set up an advisory body. One or two false steps, for example, she met some otter people at RAC, but they tended to work in places like Argentina, West Africa and they were very willing. They would come into meetings, they wouldn’t charge us, and I said this is silly, we can have a Newham local body for an institution that depends on the needs of an international group of, however, eminent advisors, we need to develop. And secondly, we need to grow by having access to funding, consistent, quite long-term funding, and one thing we don’t have access a guarantee of is adult education funding coming from the Department of Education to Newham to Rosetta. That didn’t dry up entirely, but that reduced significantly. We needed to diversify and if we were going to diversify, we needed to change. So, we talked about that and we agreed we really should apply to become a charity, and charitable status would open up doors to us. We hoped it could open up private foundation doors, but certainly open up doors like the Arts Council and more likely with GLA. Newham might be more comfortable with us as a partner if we were a charity as it gives a more stable and secure feeling , em, eh, we went through that process and 4 years ago it became a charity. We have trustees and we have a more diverse and local board as well and we have advisors. I’ve chaired it ever since and I’m happy to do so at the moment. It’s a key moment as Sanaz is leaving us and has been with us for many years than she would care to remember, and we have appointed a successor who will take office from the beginning of August.
INT: Can you tell us about your connection with Newham?
DF: Well, I can’t claim to be Newham born and bred. I’m a Londoner and I’ve lived in Islington for, eh, 50 years and I lived in Golders Green, except when I was abroad, but basically, I’ve been a Londoner, except when I have been at university or elsewhere. My parents grew up in the East End. I was well aware of the general pattern of almost all Northern Hemisphere cities, and the East End being a major part of the capital cities that needed more support and had all sorts of potential and needed enrichment and potential and needed effort putting into that. It’s been a part of my life trying to do that. I was a civil servant for many years and eh, the core activity I was engaged in was developing basically systems of funding to transfer money to those areas that needed it the most. That had pupils and adults that needed extra support in order to fulfil themselves. And that has been my life, professional work, or a main part of it. If you like, Newham was a part of that, what you might call, my social contract, and I would commit myself to that. It’s not a chore, it’s something I am happy to do, but, can’t claim to have detailed knowledge of Newham. Indeed, if we talk about where my parents came from, Whitechapel, Stepney, not very far down the road. What is interesting about Newham is that it has its core…but it’s a very mixed community and also statistics suggest it has the largest BME population in the country. At ward level, Brent or Bradford would be higher. As a borough, I think we here highest and that gives us challenges, obviously, but that gives us opportunity because we have a very diverse population that brings us skills and backgrounds which is very much part of Rosetta to unlock. And this exhibition, Windrush, is only one angle into that, and em, we have probably been quite good, but I feel we wanted to have a foothold further the East in the borough, is to do more with the Bangladeshi, Pakistani, sub-continent, South Asian populations at large, who have a rich background to work from. We have artists from those communities who could act as intermediaries, unlocking them and working with us.
I think that’s what attracted me to Rosetta from the start because we get a lot of credit from the Arts Council for this. We are quite a slim organisation, quite small, lots of administration, a lot of pressure on staff, basically one office. People say where is all the activity? Where are all the people that deliver? The answer is, it’s all out there, it’s all our tutors and educators, artists, sculptors, potters who are our network of collaborators and they don’t appear in our books. Which in some ways is a strength for us because we have no responsibilities, but then it is also weakness as we can’t assemble the troops when we negotiate everything. It’s a partnership world, we are a small body and it’s the only way we can survive. We depend on some big partners, Newham, particularly, GLA, Arts Council, (who have been very supportive), but it has been encouraging, and particularly inspiring. But it’s fragile. It could all disappear. I keep coming back to the Arts Council being our fans. One of the reasons we were able to survive COVID is because we have some very low overheads. I didn’t have direct dealing with all our arts collaborators, I’ve mentioned, educators, sculptors, painters, but what did we do for them; precious little, sympathy and not even tea with the sympathy eh, there was no question of them being furloughed as they were not on our books, they we on contract…we support activities that depend on face to face contact, but we did pretty well with things going virtually, and financially we were fine, if you look at our growth profile, there’s a deferment obviously, but we didn’t lose a lot of income, what we had from enlightened commissioners, and beneficent donors, was, if you like, investment in our future that deferred.
It’s been good to be a good body to be involved in like that. We do aspire to reach out to more, and one of the things on our agenda for next year, depending on our funders, is to find a second base that might eventually become our main base. The need will be to have a profile at the eastern end of the borough because London is very organic, and Stratford has become a major centre. It’s going to be quite a long time before it, say, completes with South Kensington, but there are aspects of the South Kensington Museums being put into place, there the BBC Orchestra, Saddlers Wells, UCL and UEL anyway and V&A East – so that’s just the culture part. Things go with the culture things, there is a self-reinforcing redevelopment. We benefit from that and one of the missions of Rosetta is to act as the intermediary from the big guys from the West and our local community to make sure they can embed them into the community to provide introductory courses, associated courses and provide links. Of course, that doesn’t reach very far into the Eastern side of the borough, but we would like to have another base there…If we are to develop and fulfil the mission, we certainly need to provide a full service beyond Newham, but, I would hope, to meet needs beyond Newham where they haven’t got as much access to arts at large. We do need, ideally, to have another base.
INT: Can you talk a bit more about what you have experienced the changes of Rosetta to be?
DF: When I joined I was joining a body that mainly focused on art education courses, fine art, pottery, sculptor and over the years we have gone beyond that, wrap around, commissioning art for public festivals, working with partners in a range of art activities. Not only being locked in here but reaching out. That has been developed year by year driven very much by the Chief Executive, Sanaz, em, but with support from The Board, from myself, and the challenge is to keep pedalling, because the art education money came through the education world, which is very orderly. You enrol a student to a particular course from a particular background and, tick, money flows and you know what money you are getting and that was the core funding for Rosetta when I joined. Now, a very high proportion of our funding is ad hoc, short term, one off. If we’re lucky it’s for a year, if we are unlucky, it’s for a weekend. There’s a lot of work involved in that and the Rosetta staff have been terrific in generating that sort of income. It’s much more insecure, we are much more vulnerable, but it also means we are much more out there cos we are out there pitching for money; we are out there working with partners; we are part of a network of partners, for example, Sanaz chairs a Newham Creative Body which has 80 or 90 members. That’s a terrific number in the art world! The challenge is to enjoy keeping the pedalling and not fall off the bike. And to carry on the metaphor, there may be steep hill, or there may be nasty declines. You have to be ready for that. That’s one of the reasons we have charitable status, board members, but it is basically the staff here that do that. We depend on networks of partners, some of whom give their time for free. Around the art world there are professionals in software, and money and law who give us support at cut prices or at zero.
INT: What’s your vision of the future?
DF: I have a two-fold vision for Rosetta. One, is that is becomes recognised as one, if not the key route for art education locally to be able to develop, not just visual arts, but possibly a wider range of the creative arts, not just two dimensional, and that that should be properly funded so that we could employ a body of people that could be properly funded so we can work in collaboration with universities and places like that. The other thing, extending on from that, is that Rosetta should be seen as a partner across a whole network of major bodies that are coming into Newham and over the next 20 – 30 years – that are going to form East London. There will be a different sort of image and feel. I mentioned the South Kensington Museums, which made that impression in the 19th century and it’s not totally ridiculous to think of that happening over the next 50 years here, and Rosetta should be a central part of that.
