Find Where You Fit

REGENERATE is not a program that belongs to one organisation. It is a shared effort to build something that does not yet exist in Australia: the awareness, relationships and practical tools to help the arts and cultural sector navigate transition well.

The work needs different people to do different things. This section is designed to help you find your entry point - not as a checklist, but as an honest account of what each part of the ecology is being asked to consider, and why it matters.

Leaders

Starting point

If you are a board member or leader of an arts or cultural organisation of any size you may already be living the reality this paper describes. The experience of running an organisation in conditions of chronic financial precarrity is profoundly isolating - making decisions alone, managing anxiety within teams, maintaining a confident public face while privately navigating impossible questions. You cannot 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?

Or you may be in a healthier position - but aware that the ground is shifting. Audiences are changing. Funding relationships are evolving. The strategic questions that felt distant five years ago feel closer now. Either way, the absence of frameworks, peer support, and shared language for navigating transition affects you directly.

Put transition on the Agenda - before you need to. Regularly consider transition 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 you serve most need if your organisation were to change form? These questions, asked in conditions of organisational health, produce very different answers than when they are first raised in crisis. A leadership that only thinks about transition when survival is already in doubt has already lost most of its options.

Seek peer support early. If you are facing difficult questions about your organisation’s future, seek peer connection now - not when the situation is critical but while there is still time and space to think. This requires you to develop the personal and professional capacity to ask for help, which the sector’s culture of resilience and self-reliance makes genuinely difficult. REGENERATE is working to build the peer networks and confidential support services that make this connection possible. In the meantime, reach out to a trusted colleague. You are almost certainly not the only one.

If you lead a major organisation, own your place in the ecology. Major organisations (federally or state funded) hold something others do not: sustained, trusted relationships with government and philanthropy built over decades. A CEO or artistic director of a major company can raise uncomfortable questions about sector transition with a minister or a foundation chair in ways that a small organisation fighting for survival cannot do without triggering alarm about its own viability. This leverage is almost entirely underutilised. Use your relationships to advocate for transition funding frameworks that benefit the whole ecology. Raise the questions that smaller organisations cannot raise safely. Bring your own experience of structural change - board succession, leadership transitions, post-pandemic adaptation - into sector conversations rather than managing it in silence.

Consider becoming an active transition partner. The most underdeveloped role for major organisations is as partners in the transitions of smaller ones. You have infrastructure that a restructuring smaller organisation desperately needs: experienced governance, financial management, HR capacity, venue and production infrastructure, audience relationships. A major theatre company that absorbs a smaller company’s signature program - providing infrastructure, oversight and a pathway to independence - is contributing to sector renewal in a way that its operational budget alone cannot. These arrangements are currently ad hoc and poorly documented. Help build the frameworks that make them replicable.

Begin by

Ask one question at your next leadership or Board meeting: If our organisation needed to change form in the next three years, would we know how to do it well? The conversation that follows will tell you everything you need to know about where to begin.

Sector

Starting point

Sector bodies are the connective tissue of the arts and culture ecology. You hold the networks, the professional development infrastructure, and the public voice that shapes how the sector understands itself. But transition has not historically been part of your core work. Conferences celebrate openings, launches, and new seasons. Professional development focuses on growth, leadership, and sustainability. The organisations that are struggling, restructuring, or ending tend to disappear quietly, and the sector learns nothing from their experience.

This is not a criticism. It reflects the same systemic silence that affects every part of the ecology. But sector bodies are uniquely positioned to change it.

Build transition literacy into your core work. 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 your artform or subsector, and creating space at sector events for leaders to discuss what they are navigating. Not as a crisis panel at the end of a conference day, but as a standing part of professional practice.

Document and share transition stories. Commission and publish accounts of organisations that have navigated transition — well and badly, with the consent and leadership of those involved. Make these stories 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. The sector cannot learn from transitions it cannot see.

Connect your members to each other. The peer support that leaders navigating transition most often say they lack is not formal programs or structured curricula. It is 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 skilled enough to hold difficulty without resolving it prematurely. Internationally, this kind of peer infrastructure has proved more valuable than any toolkit.

Begin by

Put transition on the agenda at your next major gathering. Not as a problem to be solved, but as a professional capability worth developing. Ask your members what they need. You may be surprised by the relief that follows when the silence is broken.

Government

Starting point

Government arts and cultural funding frameworks are not designed for transition than. Operational funding is typically contingent on ongoing delivery of programming outcomes. The moment an organisation signals it may not continue in its current form, its eligibility for operational funding becomes uncertain. There is no dedicated transition funding stream. There is no published policy on how government engages with organisations navigating structural change. Arts officers, often deeply committed to the organisations they work with, have no training or frameworks for having these conversations.

The system, in effect, penalises honesty. An organisation that tells its funding body it is considering a merger, a restructure, or an ending risks losing the very funding it needs to manage that process well. The rational response is silence - and silence produces the worst possible outcomes.

Develop explicit policy frameworks for transition support. Creative Australia, state and territory arts bodies, and relevant government departments should develop and publish clear frameworks for how they engage with organisations navigating structural transition. What transition funding is available? How can organisations access it without triggering premature withdrawal of operational support? What is government’s role in facilitating - rather than simply witnessing - well-managed transitions? These frameworks don’t need to be elaborate. They need to exist.

Train your people. 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. How to connect organisations with peer support and practical resources. This training should be developed in consultation with organisations that have navigated transitions and with international practitioners who have built this capability elsewhere.

Advocate for structural reform. Government arts agencies should advocate within government for changes to funding frameworks that currently make good transitions impossible. That means reforming operational grant conditions that restrict the use of reserves for transition purposes, establishing sector-wide transition funds, and recognising transition planning as a legitimate activity within existing funding agreements.

Begin by

Publish a statement. Even a brief, clear signal from a major funding body that transition is a normal part of sector life - and that organisations exploring it will not be punished - would shift the dynamics for hundreds of organisations currently managing difficulty in silence.

Funders

Starting point

You probably already know which of your grantees are in difficulty. Portfolio-level intelligence gives you visibility that individual organisations do not have about each other. But the norms of funder-grantee relationships make it very hard to surface that knowledge. You fear being seen as withdrawing support. You’re uncertain about your role. You know your words carry enormous weight - a funder expressing concern about viability can itself become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

The result is that funders often watch the slow collapse of organisations without finding a way to intervene helpfully - neither offering the direct financial support that might enable a well-managed transition, nor facilitating the conversations that might open other options.

Change what you fund. Transition planning is a legitimate and fundable activity. An organisation that approaches you with a clear-eyed assessment of its situation and a plan for a managed transition — whether that is a merger, a recombination, or a dignified ending - is demonstrating exactly the kind of strategic thinking funders say they want. Fund it. A transition grant is not a failure grant. It is an investment in the health of the ecology.

Change how you relate. Participate in cross-sector funder learning on transition. Share what you are seeing across your portfolio - not to breach confidences, but to build a shared picture of what is happening in the sector. Engage with funder learning labs and networks, both in Australia and internationally, that are developing best practice for supporting organisations through structural change. Be honest about the ways funder behaviour inadvertently makes transitions harder - the reporting requirements that assume growth, the timelines that don’t accommodate complexity, the silence that leaves grantees guessing.

Change what you ask. Consider what it would mean to add a single question to your conversations with grantees: What would a good transition look like for your organisation, if one were needed? Not as an ominous signal, but as a normalising gesture - one that says transition is part of how healthy ecologies work, and that you are willing to support it.

Begin by

Coordinate with other funders. Pooled approaches to transition support reduce the burden on individual organisations of navigating multiple funder relationships during a period of change. Even informal funder conversations about what you are each seeing can shift the dynamics significantly.

Wherever You Sit…

The relationships, models and modes REGENERATE describes will not be built by a single organisation or a single funding decision. It will be 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