Frances Bennett has been a musician for most of her life. She teamed up with fellow musician Hilary Coleman in 1997 to work together around a shared interest in Cornish music. Their professional backgrounds in education had long been complemented by passions for music. Initially they worked as two self-employed individuals conceiving and running workshops and events. Their intention was to fit the work around the demands of family lives with young children.
By 2001 Frances and Hilary were becoming clearer about what constituted their common practice and their personal directions, ‘We adopted the name of Cumpas and set about seeking to raise funds for a project focused on reviving Cornish music. We brought in a third practitioner, a dancer as a member of the team.’
By 2002, in the course of drawing up their plans, the Cumpas team learnt of Creative Skills and started taking advantage of the full range of information, advice and guidance on offer. ‘We attended courses and seminars, took the Management for Creative Practitioners course, sought financial help through the Skills Fund and used various mentors.
They were aware they needed to learn a number of new skills and drew on expert and specialist help in order to make Cumpas effective and successful.
Significant funding from Southwest Arts for a large project in 2003 led to a demand for more activity from schools and other organisations. The core team became three but did not feel well equipped to deal with the all the intricacies of management. They were able to acquire administrative and financial help from the Art Centre Trust, along with the continued professional development support from Creative Skills. As Frances says ‘ they were always at the end of the phone, willing to advise and guide us.’
Once the project finished, Frances and the other team members felt it was necessary to ‘regroup’ to review their objectives, their successes, the opportunities that were presenting themselves and the suitability of their organisational form for future developments. To date the team had joint responsibility for the management, but were still self-employed individuals. This review exercise was undertaken with the help of business mentoring from Creative Skills and led to Cumpas very recently becoming a company limited by guarantee with charitable status. Frances says that there have been some very obvious benefits of this change as she has noticed ‘PR benefits from the addition of charitable status’. They are investigating sharing premises.
Cumpas already has a cluster of people working with Frances and Hilary in various capacities; there is a board of six people, and a team of volunteers, another of workshop leaders, event co-ordinators, people providing the specialist administration and bookkeeping help and legal support. Additionally they have a consortium of bands to draw on for various activities and events.
The services of Creative Skills have been important to the development of Cumpas as a creative enterprise and to Frances and Hilary growing into competent creative entrepreneurs. Frances feels they have learnt a great deal in so many ways and could not have made the progress or accomplished so much without it. The professional development opportunities had spin offs in terms of offers of work and good opportunities for networking.
