To mark their recent smash success with the Big Give appeal, Laura Robertson speaks to Arts Emergency CEO Neil Griffiths about why it’s absolutely essential to keep on advocating for working-class kids – and how their brand of arts mentoring is quite literally changing lives… 

Did you know that fewer than one in 10 arts workers come from working-class backgrounds? The social justice organisation Arts Emergency has been tirelessly working to change these statistics since 2013: by helping young people from underrepresented and under-resourced backgrounds break into the arts and culture sectors.

Last month, they smashed their fundraising target of £22,000 in just seven days with the Big Give campaign, raising enough cash to fund tailored one-to-one mentoring, training and peer support for 300 young people. With long term support over a ten year period for thousands of youngsters across the UK, this will mean opportunity to understand the arts from the professionals who already work within in, demystifying the jobs, and, as one mentee put it, “open doors I thought were closed.”

I meet Neil Griffiths, CEO & Co-Founder of Arts Emergency, on Zoom, where he was wrapped up in a scarf and jumper, sat in front of a painted mural of a seascape.

Laura Robertson: Nice to meet you on your holidays at the beach. How lovely! [laughs]

Neil Griffiths: [laughs] It’s a real beach! No, I’m based down in Margate, in an art studios, a former children’s play centre. Well, nice to meet you. I’m so sorry I’ve been so evasive over the last 6 months. It’s not by design.

I presume it’s because you’re just so bloody busy helping all of those young people. 

Artists and teenagers, it’s intense!

Glad to hear it [laughs]. If I can be serious for a moment, Mike and I, who run The Double Negative, we’re both from working class backgrounds. And we absolutely adore the work that you do, and want to support it. 

Oh, my thank you so much. It means a lot.

What still surprises you about Arts Emergency? 

The things I get to say about Arts Emergency nowadays just blows my mind. Like four people a day, for 14 years, have signed up to our network to volunteer to help other people in solidarity. It’s what makes Arts Emergency a truly people-powered movement!’ It’s wild. We’ve raised millions from the public for a cause that’s all about art and culture! We are a popular movement, the biggest in my lifetime for these things, but, we’re also still a very small charity that year-on-year only has a third of the funding we need to maintain it, never mind grow it.

And I imagine you’re aiming for many more young people across the UK to be mentored.  

Yes, year-on-year we aim to be able to match more young people with a suitable mentor, we hate turning anyone away! And we have expansion plans but we’re realistic about them, we have to ensure we can offer the same high-quality programme as we do now in other regions but we need the funding to be able to do this.

We offer up to ten-years of support to every young person that joins. So, all we want from donors is what they can afford – that could be £2 a month, £5 a month, whatever their version is. We’ll do something wonderful with it, and that’s the very practical, optimistic approach we took from day one really. From the mentee, the young person, we simply want for them to have enough trust in us to put their best, most aspirational self into the process.

The Arts Emergency offer is simple, practical, and optimistic, but it is also radical – you call it an alternative old boy network, which is brilliant. I’m very much in favour of this! You mentioned your activist past. Can you say a bit more about that, and its influence on the charity? 

So, it comes from my time as an activist, really, where I raised money and gave it directly to workers groups who were striking or campaigning around the world. We did things you can’t do now, like blockade Oxford Street in protest of workers’ rights in the garment industry. I feel like we’ve just managed to take that spirit and put it into a space – the arts – that hasn’t really had that very tough edge to it. You know, art is always this soft, ‘Aren’t we all nice people? Let’s let others come in and have a nice time.’

There’s a great deal of misunderstanding about what the arts is, from outside, and even within it. It’s such a broad spectrum of jobs, careers, one-off projects, unpaid work. It’s such a mess, and it so desperately needs demystifying at every level. I mean, how on earth are young people meant to get a foothold? What can they do in the arts?  

All young people are told is that they’re going to earn bugger all, and have trouble getting into the right rooms, because it’s all about who you know. They’re not told about, as you said, the broad spectrum of jobs and careers within the creative and cultural sectors and the different pathways there are. And what skills studying arts and humanity degrees can give.

That’s where our mentors really shine: they can give actual real-life insights about their experiences. They support their mentees to do this, and the support can vary massively but is so fundamental.

The message from society is, you’ll be worse off because it’s so expensive to go to art school. You’re going to be a starving artist. You’re going to have to work seven days a week, below minimum wage. And, to quote you from last year’s Guardian article, ‘There are people who come from working-class and marginalised backgrounds who have achieved all the success that you would want to have and still struggle to sustain a standard of living.’ That really struck me. I’m 41 now, and I’ve worked in the arts my whole life, and that’s me.  

I know working-class Bafta-winners, amazing people at the top of their game who can’t pay the nursery fees. I know working-class authors that had movies made who live off loans waiting for the next book to come through. Isn’t it important for us as individuals to speak up about this? And as a society? And isn’t it mad that you can be successful by every metric, and still not materially secure in any way.

Thank you, and thank you Arts Emergency team, for acknowledging it. 

I think that says something very obvious about the state of the world and the society we live in right now, and the fact that material security is counterproductive to profit margins. It’s something that’s been whittled away further and further up the social chain. You know, I’m firmly middle class now: I’ve got kids, a house, I’m a CEO, and I count the pennies even in my life.

There’s something about the arts which is the ultimate expression of being human. It’s all the contradictions that we hold as human beings, expressed and put into action in the most limitless way. But it’s that dead weight of material need that just dictates how much you can commit to art. You’re meant to give your entire soul to it to be a decent artist of any sort, or activist. You know, the third sector [not-for-profit] itself has exactly the same issues.

It’s worth saying, because it does suck. And it doesn’t have an easy answer, but it’s a reality for most of the people in Arts Emergency.

And it’s important to continue to talk about the realities of being working-class. I don’t personally believe that social mobility happens, I still think of myself as working class, you carry it with you. I’m still butting up against barriers all the time. Even though on paper my CV looks good, there are still lots of different areas I need to access in order to develop and to grow, in publishing for example, that I don’t have any contacts in. It’s a constant battle. 

100% of our board and 90% of the team would have met at least one of the eligibility criteria to get an Arts Emergency mentor at 16.

What? That’s astonishing. 

The remarkably important thing is that you can’t do that by design. We’re all beneficiaries and play a part here. But organisationally, despite its wild success, its big profile, the top-level practice that we’ve developed hand-in-hand with young people around empowerment, we ourselves lack entry points. We struggle for funding because we’ve had to rely on people that understood the cause, that couldn’t give that much.

The minute we hit the buffers, I feel all my personal demographic privilege comes into play: straight, white cis man, university educated. I have to lean into all those privileges. I have to get into spaces to try and get money for this cause. And if we had a global majority, CEO female, I don’t know that they’d be able to pull the levers or go into the rooms. I do.

And despite having some wildly influential, important business people on the board, because of our backgrounds, we don’t have anyone we can phone to go ‘Oh, hey, can you chuck us £10K?’ We don’t have mates that will fund anything. That is only a recent thing I’ve realised about Arts emergency. I didn’t really know we were working-class-led until it was pointed out. I’m very proud of that, it explained a lot of the challenges we’ve had.

You should be very proud of it. I mean, it speaks to the work that you do. You are specialists in what you do now, and the fact that you all would have been recipients at 16 means that you truly understand this, inside out. Isn’t it interesting to talk about what success continues to look like throughout your adult life? If you’re from a working-class background, those shifts and negotiations you have to have, on a professional, personal or an emotional level. There’s a lot of shame and weirdness about even talking about success, isn’t there. 

Yeah, I make a point now of really hyping myself up in front of my family! This sense of humbleness of ‘don’t get out your lane’. It is ingrained. I know that it really pisses one of my family off when I talk about my honorary doctorate. I did make a big thing of it, but it was a little bit provocative for people, even in my closest circle. Even my mum was like, ‘What’s that even for?’

You’ve got to appreciate successes and acknowledge where you’ve come from, because you can disappear into the system. Your accent goes. You can forget your background. I could tell you many stories about people in theatre, museums, academia, who will suddenly go ‘Oh, yeah, I grew up on a council estate’, but you wouldn’t know. If you’re a global majority person, you’re burdened with that visibility in the system, so you can’t disappear.

And I think some sometimes I reflect on my demographics, and I think how important it is that we do stay close to our heritage, and we do stand up as role models to everyone else coming through collectively across all of our different backgrounds. We’re all struggling against forces that want to diminish us.

Laura Robertson 

If you’d like to donate to Arts Emergency, please go to arts-emergency.org/donate 

Bursar Club: consider pledging a donation towards one young person’s place in the Arts Emergency life-changing network arts-emergency.org/donate/become-a-bursar  

Image credits from top: Neil Griffiths, Arts Emergency CEO & co-founder – Photo by Rob Greig taken at the 2023 Mentoring celebration event at The Place, London. Photo of mentoring introduction event - Photo by Rob Greig. Arts Emergency Manifesto 2024. Photo of mentoring pair - Photo by Rob Greig