Executive summary
The average practising professional artist in Australia earns $23,200 per year from their creative work: half the minimum wage. Federal arts funding is at historic lows in real terms. State governments are cutting or freezing budgets. Post-pandemic audiences have not fully returned. Below the headline figures of creative industries contributing $63.7 billion to GDP, a structural fragility is deepening: concentrated in the small-to-medium and independent organisations, and the artists and cultural workers who sustain them, that form the generative core of Australian cultural life.
The sector is in transition. But it is navigating that transition largely alone, in silence, without the language, relationships, or practical tools to do it well.
Every month, organisations across Australia are making existential decisions in private - about whether to close, merge, reconfigure, or persist against unsustainable odds. When these decisions go badly, the consequences are severe: decades of expertise lost overnight, workers and communities harmed, and opportunities for genuine renewal missed. When organisations do not make these decisions at all, the consequences are slower but equally serious: exhausted leaders, demoralised workforces, and organisations that become progressively less able to serve the communities they exist for.
What is missing is not simply a better toolkit. It is a shift in the sector's collective capacity to think, talk and act on transition - across all three of the levels where cultural change happens: awareness and narrative, relationships and peer learning, and practical tools and services.
Internationally, this is beginning to change. The United Kingdom's Decelerator has pioneered a model for supporting civil society endings that is demonstrating real results. European networks like IETM are producing foundational research on the relational and temporal fabric that sustains artistic work and arguing for investment in that fabric, not only in the outputs it produces. Organisations in North America are building new models of creativity as social infrastructure. Australia is absent from this conversation, that needs to be addressed. Now.
This paper argues for the development of genuine transition infrastructure in Australia: a publicly visible body of work that normalises transition as an act of cultural stewardship; a peer network and field of practice that connects leaders navigating similar terrain; and practical, well-designed tools and services adapted to the Australian context.
The paper's principal recommendations are:
Funders should establish dedicated transition funding streams - including end-of-life grants and merger support - and invest in their own capacity to have enabling transition conversations with funded organisations.
Government arts agencies should develop policy frameworks for transition support, including guidance for arts officers on how to engage with organisations navigating change, and advocacy for structural funding changes that make planned endings possible.
Sector bodies should build transition literacy into their advocacy, professional development and peer network activities, and begin documenting and sharing transition stories as a visible public act.
The sector as a whole should invest in a dedicated transition infrastructure program - I’m calling this REGENERATE - that builds awareness, relationships and practical capability across all parts of the arts and cultural ecology.
What this paper is not arguing
Arguments of this kind attract predictable and understandable objections. It is worth naming four of them at the outset and clarifying that where this work stands in relation to them, as part of a solution that responds systemically, relationally, and durationally.
This is not either/or.
This is not an argument against increased arts funding.
The sector needs more money. That is a separate argument - one I support - and nothing in this paper should be read as weakening it. Transition infrastructure does not compete with increased operational funding; it addresses what happens in the gap between where funding currently is and where it needs to be.
A sector with more money will still need the capacity to navigate structural change with intelligence and care. Equally, this work should not itself become a new burden on an already strapped sector.
What is proposed here is a defined, time-limited investment- modelled on international precedents like the UK’s Decelerator, which achieved significant impact at modest scale -with its initial funding sought primarily from philanthropic and research sources rather than from existing government arts funding pools.
The goal is to expand the resources available to the sector, not to redistribute what is already inadequate.
This is not a managed contraction strategy.
There is a legitimate fear that building a language and infrastructure for endings will give funders and government a way to withdraw from relationships while appearing to act supportively. This paper takes that concern seriously: it is a real dynamic, and it shapes how transition support must be designed.
The response is not to avoid the subject but to build infrastructure that is genuinely independent of funder interests, structurally protected from capture, and explicitly focused on the needs of organisations and communities rather than on the comfort of those with power.
This is not a claim that good endings erase community harm.
For communities that have relied on a particular organisation for cultural life (often communities with few alternatives) a well-managed ending is still an ending. The harm is real and cannot be ignored.
The argument is that where transitions happen, communities deserve to be active participants rather than recipients of bad news; that the knowledge and relationships held by closing organisations belong to communities, not to institutions; and that genuine emergence - new organisations, community-controlled structures, First Nations-led formations - requires active investment, not passive hope.
This is not only about the small-to-medium sector.
The assumption that major government-funded organisations are structurally secure is patently false.
Symphony orchestras, major theatre companies and flagship visual arts institutions are navigating genuine structural challenges - post-pandemic audience attrition, board succession pressures, workforce transformation, and questions about relevance that are as live for them as for anyone.
Part Six of this paper addresses the specific role of large organisations in this ecology: not as bystanders to a small-sector problem, but as actors with distinctive responsibilities and distinctive leverage.
Why would anyone choose this?
A paper that argues for transition infrastructure- including the infrastructure for endings - must address the question that anyone who has worked in or around the sector will immediately ask: why would organisations voluntarily engage with this?
In government, in philanthropy, and in the sector itself, the overwhelming instinct is to persist. No board votes to close. No artistic director raises the possibility of an ending with funders unless the situation is already desperate. The gravitational pull toward continuation is immense, and for understandable reasons: organisations represent decades of labour, identity, community relationship, and purpose.
The answer is not that organisations should want to end. It is that the people already living this reality - and there are many of them, right now, across Australia - deserve better than what they currently have, which is silence, isolation, and the slow accumulation of harm.
What transition infrastructure offers, first and foremost, is relief. The moral injury of maintaining a confident public face while privately managing impossible decisions is one of the sector’s most pervasive and least acknowledged costs. Leaders describe the experience as profoundly isolating: making decisions alone, managing anxiety within teams, unable to ask funders the questions that matter most.
REGENERATE is not asking people to choose endings. It is offering the people who are already holding unsustainable positions the language, the peer connection, and the practical tools to stop doing it alone.
What it offers next is agency. An organisation that can think clearly about endings can also think more clearly about mergers, recombinations, partnerships, and new forms. Transition infrastructure does not push anyone toward a particular outcome. It expands the range of options available at the moment when options feel most constrained. The four types of transition described in this paper - endings with integrity, collaboration and merger, recombination and spin-off, emergence and new formation- are all options.
Currently, most organisations in difficulty can see only two: persist or collapse. That is not a real choice.
Finally, what it offers is protection. Not from endings, but from bad endings- the ones that happen to organisations when funding is withdrawn without warning- when a governance crisis erupts publicly, when reserves run out with no plan in place. These endings are already happening across the sector. They are happening to organisations that did not choose them and were given no support to navigate them. The question is not whether organisations will face structural change, but whether they will face it with infrastructure or without it.
PART ONE
This structural moment
The Australian arts and cultural sector has long operated under financial pressure. But the pressures converging in the mid-2020s are qualitatively different from previous cycles of austerity, not a temporary tightening before recovery, but a structural reconfiguration of the conditions in which arts organisations exist.
The funding reality
Federal government spending on arts and cultural development has declined in real terms for over a decade. The Revive national cultural policy, launched in 2023, was welcomed by the sector as a significant recommitment, and in some areas it has delivered, particularly in restoring operational funding to Creative Australia and establishing new bodies like Music Australia and Writing Australia. But the headline investment figures uncover an uncomfortable reality.
The Revive national cultural policy was funded at $286 million over four years from the 2023-24 Federal Budget: a significant recommitment that restored core operational funding and established new bodies including Music Australia and Writing Australia. However structural support for the small-to-medium sector has remained meagre. The 2025-26 Budget's most significant new arts-specific initiative was $8.6 million for Revive Live - a program supporting grassroots music venues and touring, later extended to $25 million over two years from 2025–26.
No new funding was announced for small-to-medium organisations, independent artists or the ecological challenges facing the broader sector. Government investment in arts and culture has not kept pace with population growth; per capita spending in real terms is lower now than it was in 2007-08.
At state and territory level, the picture is more varied but the trends are similarly concerning. Victoria's state government recent funding (or defunding) announcements have shattered basic assumptions about government support and shocked an already punch-drunk sector. New South Wales has been slow to replace post-pandemic arts investment with structural support. Queensland's ten-year strategy, is the anomaly accompanied by the scale of investment needed to deliver on its goals.
Even pre-pandemic, Australia's government spending on culture was among the lowest in the OECD at 0.9% of GDP (compared to an OECD average of 1.2%, and far below Nordic nations such as Iceland (3%), Norway (1.8%) and Denmark and Finland (around 1.5%)). The pandemic exacerbated existing inequalities rather than creating new ones.
The human cost
Behind the funding figures is a human story that rarely makes headlines. Research by Macquarie University economist David Throsby and Katya Petetskaya, funded by Creative Australia and published in 2024, found that the average practising professional artist across all disciplines earns just $23,200 per year from their creative work: half the minimum wage. This is from 'Artists as Workers,' the seventh edition of a landmark survey series stretching back to 1983. The income figure has remained stubbornly low in real terms across successive survey cycles. Combined with post-pandemic conditions, it is producing a slow attrition of the sector's workforce that is deeply difficult to measure and almost impossible to reverse.
The small-to-medium sector, which generates the majority of Australia's new artistic work, provides career development pathways for emerging artists, and maintains deep community relationships that larger institutions cannot replicate - is bearing the greatest burden. Underemployment in the arts and recreation services division has increased. Multiple job-holding remains common, as workers cobble together creative and non-creative income to survive.
The toll on leaders and boards is equally significant, if more invisible. Arts leaders frequently describe the experience of running organisations in conditions of chronic financial precarity as profoundly isolating - making decisions alone, managing anxiety within teams, and being unable to ask funders the questions that matter most: What happens if we can't continue? What would a good ending look like? Is there another organisation this work could live in?
The silence around institutional precarity in the arts is one of the sector's most damaging open secrets. Everyone knows it is happening. Almost no-one talks about it publicly. And the cost of that silence is borne by the leaders, workers and communities least able to absorb it.
The structural pattern
What is happening across Australia's arts and cultural sector is not a set of isolated organisational crises. This is a structural pattern: the predictable consequence of a funding model built around maintaining organisations as they were conceived, rather than supporting the ecology to adapt and regenerate.
That model has three characteristic failure modes, each of which is currently playing out at scale.
1. Slow collapse
The most common pattern. An organisation becomes increasingly dependent on a small number of funding relationships. When those relationships shift — a funder withdraws, a government priority changes, a key philanthropic relationship ends — the organisation does not have the resources, governance capacity or peer support to respond strategically. It manages the situation quietly, reduces programming, runs down reserves, and eventually reaches a point where the only option is sudden closure. Staff lose jobs with little notice. Community relationships are severed. Decades of institutional knowledge disappear.
2. Persistent exhaustion
A variant of the slow collapse in which the organisation does not close but continues operating in conditions of chronic under-resourcing. Programming becomes cautious. Risk-taking - the lifeblood of arts practice - disappears. The organisation's best staff leave for more stable positions. The founding vision and purpose are gradually hollowed out. The organisation persists, technically, but is no longer doing the work it exists to do. This pattern is particularly common in organisations with strong community relationships and a sense of obligation to continue - where closure feels like betrayal but continuation requires an ongoing sacrifice of quality and purpose.
3. Forced outcomes
Funders and government, recognising the unsustainability of certain organisations, sometimes encourage or require mergers. These can be genuinely generative - creating stronger, more resilient organisations able to do more. But forced or underprepared mergers frequently damage both organisations. The cultural, artistic and governance incompatibilities that were not surfaced in the process become fault lines within the merged entity. Staff who built their professional identities within the absorbed organisation leave. Community relationships are disrupted. The resulting organisation is often weaker than either of its predecessors.
The common thread across all three patterns is the absence of permission and support, time and resources to navigate change intentionally. Organisations do not lack the will to do transitions well. They lack the tools, the language, the peer relationships and - critically - funded time to think clearly when under existential pressure.
PART TWO
The silence around transition
Understanding why the sector is in this position requires examining not just the structural pressures, but the cultural dynamics that prevent the sector from responding to them well. At the heart of those dynamics is a profound, systemic silence around transition.
Why we don’t talk about it
Arts organisations that are considering whether to close, merge or fundamentally restructure face an almost impossible communicative dilemma. To speak publicly about their situation is to risk the very outcomes they are trying to manage.
Funders may withdraw remaining support if they perceive an organisation as unviable. Philanthropic donors may redirect their giving. Staff may begin looking for other employment. Artists and community members may disengage from programming. Board members may resign to avoid reputational risk. What was a manageable challenge becomes, once named publicly, an unmanageable crisis.
The rational response, therefore, is silence. To manage the situation internally, present a confident face to the world, and hope that conditions improve. This is not dishonesty. It is a reasonable response to a system that punishes transparency and it has severe consequences: decisions are made without adequate information, support or peer input; the people who could help are not engaged; and the transition, when it eventually happens, is rushed, under-resourced and often catastrophic.
An organisation that cannot speak openly about its challenges cannot navigate them well. And a sector that cannot speak openly about endings cannot learn from them, plan for them, or ensure that the knowledge and relationships they hold survive them.
What funders won't say
The silence is not only within organisations. It is structural in funder-grantee relationships. Most funding frameworks are designed around the assumption of organisational continuity: grant applications ask about plans for growth, strategic development, and increasing impact. They rarely ask about what would constitute a good ending, or what the organisation's theory of change would look like if its current form were not available.
Funders frequently know - often earlier than the organisations themselves - when an organisation is in serious difficulty. Portfolio-level intelligence gives funders visibility across many organisations that individual organisations do not have about each other. But the norms of funder-grantee relationships create strong disincentives to surface this knowledge. Funders fear being seen as withdrawing support precipitously. They are uncertain about their role. They lack frameworks for having these conversations. And they are aware that their words carry enormous weight - a funder expressing concern about an organisation's viability can itself become a self-fulfilling prophecy.
The result is that funders often watch the slow collapse described in Part One without finding a way to intervene helpfully - neither offering the direct financial support that might enable a well-managed transition, nor facilitating the conversations between organisations and within the sector that might open other options.
What government doesn't fund
Government arts funding frameworks are even less designed for transition than philanthropic ones. Operational funding is typically contingent on ongoing delivery of programming outcomes. The moment an organisation signals that it may not continue in its current form, its eligibility for operational funding becomes uncertain. There are no standard mechanisms for transition grants: funding specifically designed to support the time, expertise and process costs of a well-managed ending, merger or reconfiguration.
This is not unique to Australia. The Decelerator in the UK has documented the same pattern in civil society extensively: organisations are funded to operate but not to end. The practical consequence is that organisations facing the end of their viability must choose between using their remaining reserves to fund transition - reserves that may be legally restricted to operational purposes - or ending without the resources to do it well.
Government arts officers, similarly, often lack the frameworks, training or mandate to have transition conversations with funded organisations. The relationships between arts officers and grantees are typically designed around accountability for grant outcomes, not strategic support for organisational decision-making. Even arts officers who want to be helpful in transition situations frequently do not know what helpful looks like.
The costs of silence
The cumulative effect of this systemic silence is substantial, operating at multiple levels simultaneously:
Knowledge loss
When organisations close unexpectedly or without adequate transition planning, the knowledge they hold - about communities, artistic practices, working methods, sector relationships and local history - is lost. This knowledge is rarely documented formally. It exists in the relationships, memories and practices of the people who built and sustained the organisation. When those people disperse, the knowledge disperses with them. This loss is irreversible.
Community harm
Arts organisations frequently hold deep, long-standing relationships with specific communities: relationships built over decades through consistent presence, cultural sensitivity and genuine partnership. When organisations end without adequate community engagement and transition planning, those relationships are severed without explanation or alternative. The communities most harmed are typically those with the fewest alternative sources of cultural engagement: regional and remote communities, communities from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds, and communities that have historically been underserved by mainstream cultural institutions.
Worker harm
Staff of organisations going through unmanaged endings frequently experience significant financial, professional and psychological harm. The loss of income with little notice, the reputational uncertainty of leaving a closing organisation, and the emotional toll of an institution they have invested in collapsing - often at considerable personal financial sacrifice - can have lasting effects. The absence of transition funding compounds this: organisations cannot afford to give adequate notice, offer professional development support for departing staff, or provide the kind of dignified acknowledgement of the work done that would help people move forward.
Sector learning loss
Perhaps the most far-reaching cost of the silence around transition is the loss of collective learning. When organisations transition well - when the process is documented, the decisions are reflected upon, and the learning is shared - the whole sector benefits. When transitions happen in the dark, the sector learns nothing. The same mistakes are made repeatedly. The same crises are navigated without the benefit of others' experience. The sector remains collectively less capable than it could be.
PART THREE
How do we discern a way forward?
Australia is not alone in grappling with these challenges. Across the UK, Europe and North America, a growing body of practice and theory is emerging around arts sector transition, renewal and regeneration. Australia's absence from this conversation is itself significant - and represents both a gap to be filled and an opportunity to build on what others have already learned.
The Decelerator (United Kingdom)
The most developed practice in this space is the Decelerator, established in the UK in 2023. Working with civil society organisations across sectors - including arts and culture - the Decelerator has built a model of transition support that is both practically effective and conceptually sophisticated.
The Decelerator's core offer includes a free confidential Endings Hotline (one-hour, one-to-one coaching sessions for leaders contemplating whether the time has come to consider an ending); a library of free transition tools covering the design, delivery and advocacy dimensions of endings; consultancy support for organisations actively engaged in transition processes; and learning labs for funders who want to understand how to support endings better.
After its first two years of operation, with more than 50 documented conversations in the first six months alone, the Decelerator has developed important insights about what makes transition support work. Chief among these: the most important intervention is often not the provision of tools but the creation of a safe space to think. Leaders who are contemplating difficult decisions need first to be able to say the unsayable - to name what they are facing without immediate consequences. The Decelerator's hotline is explicitly designed to provide this: confidential, non-directive, professionally supported space.
The Decelerator has also documented the structural obstacles that make good endings difficult - particularly the absence of transition funding and the risk that naming difficulties to funders will precipitate exactly the outcomes organisations are trying to avoid. Its advocacy work focuses on shifting funder norms and behaviour as much as building organisational capability.
The Decelerator describes its work as helping sectors 'consider possible endings as regularly and readily as growth.' This is a profound reframing: not endings as failure, but endings as one legitimate option in a full strategic repertoire.
IETM and the Art Biosphere
The International Network for Contemporary Performing Arts (IETM) has in recent years developed one of the most compelling conceptual frameworks for understanding the arts sector's structural challenges. Drawing on the work of performance theorist Bojana Kunst, IETM describes the performing arts as a 'biosphere': a dense environment of multiple, interlocking practices that together sustain the ecology.
Kunst argues that policy and funding consistently focus on the visible end-product - the performance, the exhibition, the event - while the underlying biosphere degrades. The relational, procedural and organisational fabric that makes artistic work possible is treated as overhead: necessary but not fundable, present but not valued. The result is a progressive fraying of the connective tissue that makes the sector coherent: the informal relationships, the shared knowledge, the peer learning, the mutual trust between organisations, funders and communities.
IETM's 2025 report The New International: Against All Odds argues that in an era of polycrisis the sector's response must focus first on rebuilding this biosphere. Not more project funding, not more ambitious outputs, but investment in the foundational relationships, knowledge practices and norms of mutual support that make everything else possible.
This framing is directly relevant to the question of transition infrastructure. The absence of good transition support is not merely a practical gap: it is a symptom of a broader failure to invest in the sector's connective tissue. Transition is, by definition, the moment when the biosphere is most under stress, when the relationships, knowledge and community trust held by an organisation are most at risk of being lost. Good transition infrastructure is, in this sense, biosphere maintenance.
Springboard for the Arts (United States)
In the United States, Springboard for the Arts has developed a model focused less on the endings side of the ecology and more on the emergence and renewal side: though the two are, I would argue, inseparable.
Springboard's work on creativity as social infrastructure (published in the Stanford Social Innovation Review in 2025) argues that the historic model of arts funding in the US (marginal, siloed, focused primarily on large institutions and artists with commercial potential) is not adequate to the challenges of the current moment. What is needed is a reconception of creative practice as a form of social infrastructure: embedded in communities, supported through guaranteed income and long-term investment, and valued for its contribution to social connection and community resilience rather than its economic productivity.
Springboard's practical interventions include its Guaranteed Income for Artists pilot in Minnesota, which has demonstrated that providing artists with a stable monthly income produces a cascade of community benefits: increased local economic participation, civic engagement, and creative output. This is directly relevant to the Australian context, where artist income insecurity is a fundamental driver of the sector's structural fragility.
Springboard's work demonstrates that investment in creative infrastructure - from guaranteed income to civic participation programs embedded in community life - can model the kind of emergence and regeneration that happens when transitions are actively supported rather than left to collapse.
The Cultural Commons and Commoning Practices
European cultural policy thinker Pascal Gielen’s book Trust: Building on the Cultural Commons, published in 2024, offers a complementary framework centred on the concept of the cultural commons: cultural resources that belong to communities rather than to organisations, and that must be actively managed, shared and renewed across generations.
Gielen argues that cultural policy in times of polycrisis and declining public trust must focus on two things: strengthening the foundational resilience of the arts sector - its networks, its practices of sharing resources and knowledge, its commoning practices, its long-term relationships - and acting from a place of support, partnership and trust toward the sector rather than exercising control through metrics and accountability frameworks.
This is a useful frame for understanding what transition infrastructure is for. It is not primarily about helping individual organisations manage their affairs. It is about maintaining the cultural commons — ensuring that the knowledge, relationships and community trust that organisations hold in trust are not lost when the organisations themselves change form.
What are the possible lessons from this evidence?
Taken together, the international evidence points to several clear conclusions about what effective transition infrastructure looks like and what is required to build it.
First, tools alone are not sufficient. The most significant barrier to good transitions is not the absence of practical know-how but the cultural and structural dynamics- the silence, the stigma, the funding architecture - that prevent organisations from engaging with transition questions at all. Effective transition infrastructure must work at the level of awareness and narrative, not only at the level of practical tools.
Second, relationships matter as much as resources. What leaders navigating transition most often describe needing is the experience of not being alone: peer connection with others who understand what they are facing, confidential space to think without consequences, and professional support that does not carry the risks of disclosing difficulties to funders or government. Building peer networks and communities of practice is as important as building toolkits.
Third, funders and government must be active participants. The structural obstacles to good transition- the absence of transition funding, the disincentives to transparency, the accountability frameworks that penalise honesty about difficulty - cannot be addressed by building capability only within organisations. Funders and government must change their own behaviour, and they need support and frameworks to do so.
Fourth, transition and emergence are two sides of the same ecology. Good endings create the conditions for new beginnings. Investment in transition infrastructure is simultaneously investment in the emergence of new organisations, new practices and new forms of cultural life. The two cannot be separated.
PART FOUR
A framework for sector transition
To build effective transition infrastructure, we need a clear and shared framework for what we mean by transition and for the conditions that make it possible to do transition well. This section proposes such a framework.
The ecology metaphor
The metaphor of ecology is useful here, and not merely rhetorical. In natural ecologies, health is not measured by the persistence of any individual organism but by the vitality of the whole system: the diversity of species, the health of the commons, the cycling of nutrients, the capacity of the system to absorb disruption and regenerate. Transition, including endings, is not a failure of the ecology. It is a structural feature of how ecologies maintain themselves over time.
A forest that never experienced fire, windthrow or the death of individual trees would gradually become less diverse and less resilient. The death of a large tree creates a gap in the canopy that allows light in, enabling new growth. The decomposing wood provides nutrients for surrounding organisms. The structural complexity created by fallen timber supports species that could not survive in the dense canopy above. Death and regeneration are not opposites in a living ecology. They are partners.
The arts and cultural sector work analogously. An ecology in which no organisations ever ended would be one in which resources were locked in perpetuity into existing institutional forms, regardless of whether those forms still served their original purposes. New organisations, new artistic practices and new forms of community cultural life could emerge only around the edges, always competing for scarce resources with the entrenched establishment. The sector becomes progressively less diverse and less responsive to the communities it serves.
Healthy transition- including well-managed endings - is not a symptom of sector weakness. It is a condition of sector health. The question is not whether transitions will happen, but whether the sector has the infrastructure to ensure they happen well.
Four types of transition
Not all transitions are the same. Effective transition infrastructure must address four distinct types, each with different dynamics, different challenges and different support needs.
Type 1: Endings with integrity
The wind-down of an organisation in a manner that honours its history, preserves its knowledge, supports its people, and creates conditions for what comes next. Endings with integrity are not simply the managed closure of operations: they are acts of stewardship that require time, resources, skilled facilitation and the active engagement of communities, funders and government. Well-managed endings can become generative events: the redistribution of resources, the documentation of knowledge, the release of talented people to new work, the celebration of what was achieved.
Type 2: Collaboration and merger
The bringing together of two or more organisations - whether through formal merger, joint venture, shared services, or looser collaborative arrangements. Collaboration and merger can be genuinely generative, creating organisations with greater resilience, broader reach, and combined capability. But they frequently fail when they are approached as financial solutions rather than creative opportunities: when cultural, artistic and governance incompatibilities are not adequately explored; when the human dimensions are not given adequate attention; or when one organisation's identity is simply absorbed by the other.
Type 3: Recombination and spin-off
The deliberate disaggregation of an organisation: the separation of its constituent functions, programs or teams into new or different forms. A single organisation with a broad remit may become two or three more focused organisations. A program that has outgrown its original host may be spun off as an independent entity. A community that has been served by a large organisation may choose to establish its own smaller, more responsive structure. Recombination is perhaps the least well-understood of the four types of transition, and the one most in need of practical support and documented precedent.
Type 4: Emergence and new formation
The creation of entirely new organisations - or new forms of collective practice - in the spaces created by transitions. Emergence is often discussed as if it happens naturally: close one organisation and another will spring up in its place. This is sometimes true, but it is not reliably true, and it is rarely true without support. The knowledge, relationships, resources and community trust released by a well-managed transition do not automatically find their way into new organisational forms. Emergence requires active support: resources, time, convening, and the kind of patient facilitation that helps communities and practitioners imagine what could be built in the space that has opened.
Three layers of change
The international evidence reviewed in Part Three suggests that effective transition infrastructure must work across three interconnected layers simultaneously. These are not sequential, they must be built together.
Awareness and Narrative
The cultural norms, language and public narrative that determine whether transition is seen as legitimate, shameful or neutral. Without a shift at this layer - without a publicly visible body of thought, story and argument that positions transition as a normal and skilled act -organisations will continue to navigate transition in silence, regardless of what tools are available to them.
Relationships and Field-Building
The peer networks, communities of practice, cross-sector connections and international learning relationships that allow leaders to navigate transition with the support of others who understand their situation. This layer is the one most systematically missing in the Australian context, and the one that is most often assumed to be an overhead rather than a program investment.
Tools and Services
The practical frameworks, facilitated processes, governance guides, funder handbooks and direct support services that turn awareness and relationships into informed decision-making and action. Tools without the first two layers go unused. With them, they can be transformative.
These three layers interact. Awareness-shifting creates the safety for organisations to engage with transition questions. Peer relationships provide the context in which tools are understood and applied. Tools, in turn, generate practice that feeds back into awareness and relationships. Effective transition infrastructure invests in all three layers and is designed around their interdependence.
PART FIVE
The gaps we need to broach
Against the background of international practice and the framework outlined in Part Four, we can now assess the current state of transition infrastructure in Australia. The conclusion is clear: Australia has almost none of it.
What exists in Australia
This is not to say that no transition-related activity is occurring. A number of sector bodies, funders and individual practitioners are doing work that touches on the questions this paper addresses.
NAVA (the National Association for the Visual Arts) leads advocacy and policy work for the visual arts, including on worker conditions, fair pay and structural issues in the sector. Theatre Network Australia advocates actively for the performing arts and has begun documenting structural challenges. PAC Australia has launched an Adaptive Futures program to help performing arts centres navigate climate-related structural change. Regional Arts organisations across states and territories provide support for artists and organisations in regional and remote contexts.
Creative Australia's Creative Futures Fund is investing in ambitious new work and cross-sector collaboration: addressing the emergence side of the ecology, though not the transitions, mergers or endings side. The Centre for Art and Entertainment Workplaces is addressing workforce conditions and fair pay.
Individual philanthropic funders: including the Sidney Myer Fund, Myer Foundation, Tim Fairfax Family Foundation, Paul Ramsay Foundation and others provide strategic grants to arts and cultural organisations, and some have developed sophisticated approaches to portfolio management and relationship-based grant making.
What doesn’t exist
What Australia lacks is precisely what the international evidence suggests is most needed: a dedicated, sector-wide body of infrastructure focused on transition itself. On the awareness, relationships and tools that enable organisations, funders and government to navigate structural change with skill and intention.
Specifically, there is currently no Australian equivalent of the Decelerator's free confidential support line, no toolkit library for endings, mergers or recombinations, no peer network specifically for leaders navigating transition, no formal community of practice connecting arts sector transitions with adjacent sectors where transition infrastructure is more developed, and no public narrative actively framing transition as a skilled act of cultural stewardship.
There is also no systematic engagement with funders and government around the structural obstacles to good transitions: no learning labs where funders can explore how their practices inadvertently make endings harder, and no guidance for government arts officers on how to engage helpfully with organisations navigating existential change.
Our distinctive context
Building transition infrastructure in Australia requires attention to several features of the Australian context that are not directly replicated in the UK or European models from which we can learn.
Federalism and jurisdictional complexity
Australia's federal structure means that arts and cultural organisations navigate multiple layers of funding: from Creative Australia at the federal level; from state and territory arts bodies; from local governments; and, from a range of sector-specific and program-specific funding streams. Transitions that involve changes in these funding relationships require navigation of multiple jurisdictional contexts simultaneously. Transition infrastructure must be designed to work across this complexity, and must engage government at federal, state and territory levels.
Geography and distribution
Australia is the world's sixth-largest country by area, with a population concentrated in a small number of coastal cities and a much smaller population distributed across vast regional and remote areas. Arts and cultural organisations in regional and remote Australia frequently operate in conditions of even greater funding precarity than their metropolitan counterparts, with fewer alternative funding sources, smaller philanthropic networks and less public visibility when they face existential challenges. Transition infrastructure must be designed to serve these organisations and will require deliberate investment in regional delivery and digital accessibility.
First Nations cultural sovereignty
Australia's First Nations peoples are the custodians of the world's oldest living cultures — cultures that have survived colonisation, dispossession and sustained assault on their integrity. First Nations cultural organisations are not simply arts organisations with a different artistic focus. They hold knowledge, practices and relationships that belong to communities, not to institutions. When these organisations face transition, the questions that arise are fundamentally different from those that face non-Indigenous organisations: who has the right to make decisions about transition? What happens to the cultural materials and relationships held by the organisation? How are community voices centred in the process?
If we are as serious about First Nations First as our policy documents suggest, transition infrastructure in Australia cannot be built on non-Indigenous frameworks and then 'adapted' for First Nations contexts. It must be co-designed with First Nations leaders from the outset, with self-determination principles embedded in all its elements.
A small and relationship-dependent philanthropic sector
Australian philanthropy is small by international standards, concentrated in a small number of family foundations and corporate giving programs, and characterised by strong personal relationships between donors and organisations. This means that the dynamics of transition are often intensely personal as well as institutional, the withdrawal of philanthropic support from a transitioning organisation can involve severing relationships that have been built over decades. Transition infrastructure must be designed with the specific dynamics of Australian philanthropy in mind.
PART SIX
Roles in the ecosystem
Any serious analysis of Australia's arts and cultural ecology must address the role of its largest, most publicly visible institutions. Major performing arts companies, flagship visual arts organisations, national cultural institutions and state-funded presenting bodies are not peripheral to this argument: they are central to it. Yet they are frequently absent from conversations about sector transition, either because the conversation is framed as being about small-sector vulnerability, or because large organisations have strong incentives to remain visibly stable regardless of their internal realities.
This section argues that the “major organisations” have a distinctive and largely unrealised role to play in building transition infrastructure, not as patrons of a problem that belongs to others, but as organisations navigating their own structural changes, as holders of leverage that smaller organisations do not have, and as potential partners in the practical work of sector renewal.
“Major organisations” are in transition too
The assumption that state and federally funded major organisations are structurally secure is increasingly and demonstrably wrong. Post-pandemic audience attrition has not fully reversed for most major performing arts organisations. Across the sector, the trend of ageing subscription audiences that predates the pandemic has not reversed. Governance and Board succession - finding and retaining members with the combination of sector knowledge, governance skill and philanthropic capacity that major organisations require - is a much felt challenge across the sector. Several major organisations are navigating significant workforce transformation as they respond to both financial pressure and changing community expectations.
Opera Australia, Australia's largest performing arts company, posted an operating deficit of $10.1 million in 2024 - its second consecutive year of major losses - accompanied by a full external governance review and mid-year leadership changes. Symphony orchestras in multiple states have restructured under financial pressure. The Australian Ballet has reported underlying operating losses every year since the pandemic ($6.1 million in 2022, $3.8 million in 2023, with a statutory loss of $9.1 million in 2024, the year the company was displaced from the State Theatre by renovations). Major theatre companies have quietly contracted their seasons and workforce. In each case, the pressure to maintain a publicly confident face, because these organisations' funding, donor and audience relationships all depend on visible stability, means that structural difficulty is managed in private using the same dynamics of silence this paper describes in the small-to-medium sector. Worse, it is made public in dramatic and reputationally disastrous moments of governance failure.
I am not arguing an equivalence. Small organisations facing existential difficulty do not have the reserves, the relationships or the political visibility to navigate uncertainty the way major organisations can. But the ecology argument holds across the whole sector: the question is not whether these organisations will face structural change, but whether they have the frameworks, the peer relationships and the cultural permission to navigate that change well.
Major organisations face the same dynamics of silence as smaller ones - with higher stakes, greater public scrutiny, and often less internal permission to be honest about what they are navigating
Holders of leverage
“Major organisations” hold something that small organisations rarely have: sustained, trusted relationships with government and philanthropy built over decades. An artistic director or CEO of a major company can call a minister, a departmental secretary or a foundation chair and raise uncomfortable questions about the state of the sector in a way that a small organisation fighting for survival cannot do without triggering alarm about its own viability.
This leverage is almost entirely underutilised in the current moment. The conversations that need to happen about transition funding, about the absence of infrastructure for sector renewal, about the structural conditions that make planned endings impossible, these conversations are more likely to happen if major organisations are actively having them. Not on behalf of the small sector as a form of charitable advocacy, but because major organisations recognise these as conditions that shape the whole ecology, including their own.
There is a version of this that is merely political cover - large organisations lending their names to arguments that small organisations have made, without genuinely owning the issue. The more valuable version is large organisations bringing their own experience of managing structural change: board succession, leadership transitions, post-pandemic adaptation, audience renegotiation, into a shared field of practice where that experience can be learned from across the sector.
Active transition partners
The most underdeveloped and potentially most generative role for major organisations is as active partners in the transitions of smaller ones. A major organisation has infrastructure that a closing or restructuring smaller organisation typically lacks and desperately needs: experienced governance, financial management, human resources capacity, venue and production infrastructure, existing audience relationships, and the administrative depth to absorb complexity.
There are international precedents, and some informal Australian precedents, for larger organisations providing structural shelter for smaller ones navigating transition. A major theatre company that absorbs a smaller company's signature program - providing infrastructure, oversight and a pathway to independence - is doing something different and more valuable than simply commissioning that company's work. A major visual arts organisation that creates a residency or incubation structure for an organisation in its artform ecology that is renegotiating its form is contributing to sector renewal in a way that its operational budget alone cannot.
These arrangements are currently ad hoc, under documented and often poorly designed, because there are no frameworks for thinking about them, no shared precedents to draw on, and no mutual understanding of what a well-structured transition partnership between large and small organisations looks like. Building those frameworks is one of the most concrete contributions transition infrastructure could make to the ecology.
The structural tension
Alongside these opportunities, there is a structural tension between large and small organisations that honest analysis needs to call out. Arts funding in Australia is not a zero-sum game in theory; in annual budget cycles, it often functions as one in practice. When a major organisation successfully advocates for increased operational funding, the policy attention and budget envelope available for small-to-medium organisations is not automatically expanded: it often contracts.
The relationships between large and small organisations in the same artform or geography are characterised by a real and frequently unacknowledged power differential. Major organisations employ the freelance artists that small companies rely on. They occupy the large venues that smaller companies need access to. They hold the philanthropic relationships that smaller organisations cannot reach. They shape the media narratives that determine public and political understanding of the sector. In each of these dimensions, major organisations make decisions - about employment, venue access, advocacy priorities, media engagement - that directly affect the conditions in which small organisations operate.
This is not a counsel of resentment or blame. It is an argument that genuine ecology thinking requires large organisations to examine their own impact on the conditions of the ecosystem, and to make that examination a conscious part of their institutional identity. A major organisation that is genuinely committed to a healthy arts ecology does not just fund small organisations philanthropically or offer occasional co-commissions. It thinks systematically about how its decisions shape the conditions - of access, employment, narrative and political leverage - that determine whether smaller organisations can sustain themselves and navigate change with dignity.
Well-designed transition infrastructure creates spaces for honest conversations between large and small organisations to happen, outside the power dynamics of funder-grantee or presenter-artist relationships, in a context of mutual learning rather than hierarchical generosity. That kind of honest cross-sector conversation is itself a form of infrastructure that currently does not exist in Australia.
PART SEVEN
Recommendations
The analysis in Parts One through Five and the large organisation lens introduced in Part Six lead to a set of concrete recommendations directed at different actors in the Australian arts and cultural ecosystem. These represent actions that can and should be taken now.
For funders
Recommendation 1
Establish dedicated transition funding streams
Create explicit, accessible funding mechanisms for organisational transition: including end-of-life grants, merger support, recombination facilitation, and emergence support for new organisations. These grants should be available without requiring the public disclosure of difficulties, and should be structured to support the time, expertise and process costs of transitions rather than simply providing bridge funding to extend unsustainable operations.
Recommendation 2
Build internal capacity for transition conversations
Invest in the capability of program officers and grants managers to recognise early indicators of organisational difficulty, raise transition questions sensitively and helpfully, and engage as partners in transition processes rather than simply as funders who withdraw. This will require deliberate training, revised frameworks for portfolio review, and explicit permission from foundation leadership to engage in this kind of relationship.
Recommendation 3
Participate in cross-sector funder learning on transition
Engage with funder learning labs and networks — both in Australia and internationally — that are developing best practice for transition support. Share learning about what works, what doesn't, and how funder behaviour inadvertently makes transitions harder. Consider coordinated approaches to transition support that pool resources across multiple funders and reduce the burden on individual organisations of navigating multiple funder relationships during a transition.
For policy makers
Recommendation 4
Develop explicit policy frameworks for transition support
Creative Australia, state and territory arts bodies, and relevant government departments should develop and publish explicit policy frameworks for how they engage with organisations navigating structural transition. These frameworks should address: what transition funding is available, how organisations can access it without triggering premature withdrawal of operational support, and what government's role is in facilitating (rather than simply witnessing) well-managed transitions.
Recommendation 5
Train staff in transition engagement
Arts officers at all levels of government should receive training in how to engage helpfully with organisations navigating transition - how to raise the topic, how to listen without judgment, how to offer support without creating panic, and how to connect organisations with the peer support and practical resources they need. This training should be developed in consultation with organisations that have navigated transitions and with international practitioners.
Recommendation 6
Advocate for structural changes to grant frameworks
Government arts agencies should advocate within government for structural changes to funding frameworks that currently make good transitions impossible - including the reform of operational grant conditions that restrict the use of reserves for transition purposes, the establishment of sector-wide transition funds, and the recognition of transition planning as a legitimate and fundable activity.
For sector bodies
Recommendation 7
Build transition literacy into sector infrastructure
Incorporate transition - including endings, mergers and recombinations - into the regular work of sector advocacy, professional development, and peer networking. This means talking publicly about transitions that have happened, commissioning research on the scale and nature of transitions occurring in the sector, and creating space at sector events and in sector communications for leaders to discuss what they are navigating.
Recommendation 8
Document and share transition stories
Commission and publish documented accounts of organisations that have navigated transition well, and, where organisations and individuals are willing, accounts of transitions that were difficult and what was learned. Make these stories publicly and freely available as a visible signal that transition is a normal part of sector life, and as a practical resource for leaders facing similar challenges.
For organisations
Recommendation 9
Build transition planning into governance
Arts boards should regularly put transition on the agenda alongside growth - not as a sign of crisis, but as a component of responsible stewardship. What would a well-managed ending look like? What other organisations could this work live in? What would the community we serve most need if this organisation were to change form? These questions, asked regularly and in conditions of organisational health, produce very different answers than when they are first raised in crisis.
Recommendation 10
Seek peer support before crises demand it
Leaders facing difficult questions about their organisation's future should seek peer connection early, not when the situation is already critical but when there is still time and space to think. This requires the sector to build the peer networks and the confidential support services that make such connection possible. It also requires leaders to develop the personal and professional capacity to ask for help.
Recommendation 11
Own your place in the ecology
Develop an explicit institutional position on your organisation's role in sector health - not only as a programming or employing organisation, but as a holder of leverage, relationships and infrastructure that shapes conditions for the whole ecology. Bring your own experience of structural transition, board succession, leadership change, financial restructuring, audience transformation, into sector conversations rather than managing it in silence.
Recommendation 12
Use your leverage to open transition conversations
Use your relationships with government and philanthropy to advocate for transition funding frameworks that benefit the whole ecology. Raise questions about sector transition in conversations with ministers, departmental officials and philanthropic partners where small organisations cannot raise them without triggering alarm about their own viability.
Recommendation 13
Develop transition partnership frameworks
Work with your sector body to develop and test frameworks for structural partnerships with smaller organisations navigating transition- including incubation models, program absorption arrangements, shared services, and governance partnerships. Document and share what you learn. Make the informal practices that already exist visible, evaluated and replicable
PART EIGHT
An Invitation: REGENERATE
The recommendations in Part Seven can each be acted on individually and immediately. But the full picture described in this paper - of structural pressure, systemic silence, and the absence of transition infrastructure- suggests that more is possible than the sum of individual actions. It suggests the value of something more deliberately connected: a shared effort, across the sector, to build the awareness, relationships and practical capability that make good transitions possible.
This paper calls that 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. What follows is not a blueprint. It is an orientation: three areas of work that seem important, and an invitation to begin.
Three places to start
The three-layer framework described in Part Four - awareness and narrative (we are here), relationships and field-building, tools and practical services - suggests a natural shape for this work, even if the specific activities within each layer should be determined by those who take it up.
Work on awareness and narrative to change the silence that currently surrounds transition. Documenting and sharing transition stories - with the consent and leadership of those who have navigated them - would create a visible record that endings, mergers and transformations are a normal part of how a cultural ecology functions, not evidence of failure. This is not communications work. It is the harder work of cultural change: building the shared language and shared permission that make honest conversations possible.
Work on relationships and field-building to create the peer connections that leaders navigating transition most often say they lack. Not formal programs or structured curricula, but space: to think aloud with peers who understand what it means to hold an organisation's history in one hand and its uncertain future in the other. Small cohorts, genuine confidentiality, and facilitation that is skilled enough to hold difficulty without resolving it prematurely. Internationally, this kind of peer infrastructure has proved more valuable to organisations in difficulty than any toolkit.
Work on tools and practical services to, over time, produce what currently does not exist in Australia: freely available, contextually appropriate resources for boards, leaders, funders and communities navigating transition. Legal and financial guides written for the actual conditions of small arts organisations. Frameworks for community engagement when an organisation is considering a significant change. Templates that capture institutional knowledge before it is lost. None of these need to be invented from scratch — analogues exist in the UK, the United States and across Europe — but they do need to be adapted, tested and made genuinely accessible in the Australian context.
The goal is not to build a new institution. It is to build the conditions in which the sector can develop its own capacity: the conversations, the connections and the practical knowledge that make transitions less solitary and less harmful.
Building this infrastructure does not require a fully designed program, a single lead organisation or a large budget before any work can begin. Some of it can start with a conversation. Some of it will start with a funder deciding to make a transition grant to an organisation that asks for one. Some of it will start when a sector body decides to put transition on the agenda at its next conference - not as a crisis topic but as a professional practice worth developing.
The detailed design of what REGENERATE becomes - its governance, its partnerships, its scope, its funding model - should be determined through the kind of genuine consultation and co-design that takes time and requires trust. This paper is not the place for that detail. It is the beginning of an argument for why the work matters, offered to those with the relationships, the credibility and the will to take it further.
An invitation
If the analysis in this paper resonates - if it reflects something of what you are witnessing in the organisations and communities, you work with - then the most useful response is not to wait for someone else to act on it.
Talk about it. Share this paper with a colleague who is navigating a difficult institutional decision and has nowhere to take it. Raise it with a funder who asks what the sector needs. Bring it to a board conversation about organisational sustainability and long-term stewardship. Ask whether your sector body has the capacity and the appetite to make transition literacy part of its core work.
The infrastructure this paper describes will not be built by a single organisation or a single funding decision. It will be built, if it is built, through an accumulation of smaller acts - of candour, of connection, of practical generosity between people who understand that the health of a cultural ecology depends on how it handles not only its most successful moments but its most difficult ones.
REGENERATE is a name for those acts, held together. The invitation is open.
Be part of REGENERATE.
We are building the transition infrastructure Australia's arts and cultural sector currently lacks. If you're navigating a difficult institutional decision and have nowhere to take it, we want to hear from you. If you've lived through a transition and have something to share, we need your experience. If you fund, govern, advocate for, or work in arts and culture and want to help build this -the invitation is open. Get in touch.
Further reading & references
Australia - Sector Data and Policy
1. Bureau of Communications, Arts and Regional Research. (2024). Analysis of the Cultural and Creative Sector - Revive: Sectoral Analysis. Australian Government.
2. Bureau of Communications, Arts and Regional Research. (2024). Cultural and Creative Activity in Australia, 2008–09 to 2022–23: Methodology Refresh. Australian Government.
3. Throsby, D. & Petetskaya, K. (2024). Artists as Workers: An Economic Study of Professional Artists in Australia. Macquarie University and Creative Australia.
4. Theatre Network Australia. (2025). 2025–26 Federal Pre-Budget Submission. TNA.
5. Department of Infrastructure, Transport, Regional Development and Communications. (2023). Revive: A Place for Every Story, A Story for Every Place - National Cultural Policy. Australian Government.
6. Australia Institute. (2022). Arts and Entertainment: Government Spending Analysis. The Australia Institute.
7. Creative Australia. (2024). Creative Futures Fund - First Round Investments. Creative Australia.
8. Throsby, D. & Petetskaya, K. (2024). Artists as Workers: An Economic Study of Professional Artists in Australia. Macquarie University and Creative Australia.
9. A New Approach (ANA). (2023). The Big Picture 4: Expenditure on artistic, cultural and creative activity by governments in Australia 2007-08 to 2021-22. ANA, Canberra.
10. A New Approach (ANA). (2025). Imagine 2035: Towards an arts and culture system that delivers for all Australians. ANA, Canberra.
11. A New Approach (ANA). (2025). Government, Culture and Creativity: It's about more than just funding. ANA, Canberra.
International Practice and Theory
12. The Decelerator. (2024). Glimpses of Civil Society's Evolution: Insights from the Dark and Shadowy Place of Civil Society's Closures and Other Endings. Substack.
13. IETM - International Network for Contemporary Performing Arts. (2025). The New International: Against All Odds. IETM.
14. Gielen, P. (2024). Trust: Building on the Cultural Commons. Valiz, Amsterdam.
15. Zabel, L. (2025). Investing in Creativity as Social Infrastructure. Stanford Social Innovation Review.
16. Praznik, K., Kunst, B., & Abbing, H. (2022). Which Side Are You On? Ideas for Reaching Fair Working Conditions in the Arts. IETM, Brussels.
17. Centre for Cultural Value, University of Leeds. (2021). Culture in Crisis: Impacts of COVID-19 on the UK Cultural Sector and Where We Go From Here. University of Leeds.
18. Holden, J. (2015). The Ecology of Culture. Report commissioned by the AHRC Cultural Value Project. Arts and Humanities Research Council, London.
19. The Decelerator. (2024). Glimpses of Civil Society's Evolution: Insights from Civil Society's Closures and Other Endings. deceleratoruk.substack.com, February 2024.
20. Culture Policy Room. (2025). The Last Common Ground: Supporting the Arts in a World Gone Mad. culturepolicyroom.eu.
21. Springboard for the Arts. (2024). Artists Respond: Weaving Social Connection - Program Documentation. Springboard for the Arts, Minnesota.
22. Journal of Arts Management, Law, and Society. (2024). Navigating Transitions in Arts and Cultural Governance (Special Issue). Taylor & Francis.
23. Social Enterprise Journal. (2024). Unlocking the Transformative Potential of Culture and the Arts: Innovative Practices and Policies from Social Enterprises and Third-Sector Organisations (Special Issue). Emerald.
Related Australian Initiatives
24. NAVA (National Association for the Visual Arts). Strategic Action Plan 2023–2025. visualarts.net.au.
25. PAC Australia. Adaptive Futures Program. pacaustralia.org.au.
26. Philanthropy Australia. (2023). The Vision for Creative Australia: Submission on the National Cultural Policy. philanthropy.org.au.