Origins
REGENERATE began as a paper.
In March 2026, I wrote a paper arguing that Australia's arts and cultural sector is experiencing a structural inflection point - one that demands not just more funding to sustain existing organisations, but genuine infrastructure for institutional transition: for endings that honour what has been built, for mergers that are genuinely generative, for recombinations that preserve knowledge, and for the emergence of new forms of cultural life from the spaces that transitions create.
The paper drew on international evidence, sector intelligence and the growing body of thinking about arts sector renewal from the United Kingdom, Europe and North America. Its core argument was simple: transition infrastructure is a critical, currently absent element of Australia's cultural policy landscape, and building it is not a niche concern but a strategic priority.
That argument resonated. REGENERATE is now coming to life as an initiative - designed from the outset to be picked up, shaped and contributed to by others. It is addressed to arts and cultural workers, the organisations they sustain, the boards that govern them, philanthropic funders, government arts agencies, sector bodies, and anyone who cares about the long-term health of Australia's cultural ecology.
REGENERATE is an invitation to create the infrastructure - the relationships, the models and the systems - that will support us to steward our organisations and the sector into a future worthy of what has been built and what is yet to emerge.
REGENERATE is for the people who are already living the reality it describes.
It is for arts and cultural workers, boards, organisational leaders, philanthropic funders, government arts agencies, and sector bodies. It is for anyone who is watching the structural pressures on Australia’s arts and cultural sector intensify, experiencing its impacts, and wondering what can be done - not just about funding levels, but about the way the sector navigates the changes that are already underway.
It asks for something specific: that the sector collectively build the infrastructure for navigating transition well.
By transition, I mean all of it: endings that honour what has been built, mergers that are genuinely generative, recombinations that preserve knowledge, and the emergence of new forms of cultural life from the spaces that transitions create.
By infrastructure, I mean the awareness, the peer relationships, and the practical tools that currently do not exist in Australia to support any of this.
I am calling this effort REGENERATE. Not as a finished program design, but as a name for the work: a placeholder for conversations that have not yet happened, partnerships that have not yet formed, and infrastructure that does not yet exist.
If the situation described in this paper reflects something of what you are witnessing or experiencing in the organisations you lead, fund, govern, or work in -then the most useful response is not to wait for someone else to act on it.