Mon 21 Dec 2015 In: Our Communities View at Wayback View at NDHA
This is part three of an interview in which Auckland Pride board member Shirley Allan fronts for the board on a series of concerns about the way Pride is governed and it's Festival delivered. The interview was prompted by an open and angry letter penned by Pride's now ex volunteer coordinator Baz Bloomfield. You can, and probably should, first read part one of this interview here and part two here. Let's continue talking about community accountability, using the last big Auckland Pride Festival party, called Proud, as a symbolic example. This is important because we're led to believe a profit from the party has been a much-hoped for part of Pride's financial model. As it stands, Pride has few other sources of serious income. GayNZ.com received considerable negative feedback from a wide variety of people involved in the event and party business, people's whose credentials are, in our experience, rock solid and who say Proud this year was a woeful party, under-promoted, poorly conceived and badly executed. And we heard the numbers of people who attended was comparatively low. When we brought this up in an interview earlier in the year with representatives of Auckland Pride we were told by them it was actually a wonderful party, that it only seemed to have attracted fewer people because the spaces were arranged differently. We were also told that the numbers were about the same as the previous year. DELAYS AND SILENCE It took us almost five months of constant requesting to get something as basic and simple as the actual numbers of those who attended the party. We were fobbed off again and again, we heard every promise and every excuse in the book. We were told we'd have them "by the end of the week" again and again and again. We have only recently been told by Pride that 1,200 people attended, with roughly 100 of those being unpaid, or complimentary, admissions for sponsors and the like. Questions are now being asked whether, on those numbers, the party made any profit at all to support Pride's on-going operations. Unlike most, or perhaps all, other glbti community-based organisations, Pride has not seen fit to report on its finances to the glbti communities. For three years now we as a community have not been allowed to know if the organisation is financially ok, if it's solvent, if it's being well and responsibly managed from a financial perspective. “There is often very little understanding in the wider community of what the costs of putting on such an event are,” says board member Shirley Allan. “And because we are not a registered charitable entity we are not required to put up our accounts on line.” But shouldn't Pride do it anyway, to keep faith with their community? “No. Because we are not registered as a charity or presently as a not for profit. There are lots of organisations that do work for the community similar to my own NGO that I have run for years and my own community development projects that I have run as money-making business. I would never release that financial information... that's confidential, that's my business model. What on earth would I be doing giving you my full and complete business model over how every single penny is spent, how much I got that price point on, so suddenly people can see 'oh, you only paid this much money for that...' Suddenly you're opening yourself up for competitors from a professional context... giving out that sort of information is suicide, especially in the highly competitive event industry. You'd be insane to do it.” REGULAR REPORTING But surely Pride could have been reporting publicly at some level? “Certainly there could be some [of the] vaguer information, ball park figures. When I first came on I combed through all the budgets, looking for break-even points and 'are we in the red or are we in the black.' We're surviving. We haven't hemorrhaged money anywhere. When you compare against previous years there's no giant variations there, but I can't offer you more than that.” Many in the glbti communities have an expectation that whoever is running Pride for us is doing it, and is seen to be doing it, well. But we don't know how its performing, how stable and viable it is, thereby creating an information vacuum which invites conjecture. “There's always going to be conjecture around high-profile projects. It always happens, it doesn't matter what you're delivering. And the more that people care about something the more people want it to be good.” Could not Pride report annually to the glbti communities on the basis of 'Here's what we did and here are some year-on-year indicators'? Such as 'Here's what we received in income from the Proud Party and from other sources. Here's what we spent on organising the Festival, here are the admin costs, here are the promotional expenses, here are the numbers attending festival events, etc.' Just so the community knows what's going on under the Pride dome of silence. “Absolutely, and that's part of moving through this process into that charitable space,” Allan says. “It's good practice for those accounts to be put up. I can't speak about the budget stuff that's gone before, not because I'm fobbing it off but because I'm just not aware, I haven't gone through it in that much detail. I've looked at the top line stuff and to me it's all much of a muchness. There's variation in it but nothing which springs out to me going warning warning. I leave that to others who have a bit of an eye for figures.” If Pride does put out figures, will we be able to trust the information? Because for a simple figure like "How many people attended the 2014 party," we were eventually told "1,200, about the same as 2013." Yet based on expert observation we are 95% sure that the 2013 party, run by Julian Cook who resigned as Festival and party organiser due to his treatment by Pride, had much better numbers than that. And we believe that that 2013 party returned a good profit to Pride. “I didn't go to those previous parties so I couldn't comment on the quality or the level of costs that went into them,” Allan says. ATEED FUNDING We know that Auckland City's events agency, ATEED, is funding the parade this third year... the deal was for three years funding and then all bets are off. “I believe so, at that point it will be a renegotiation. All sponsorships have that sort of time-frame. Some time sponsors stay, sometimes they go. But we can't afford for them to go, they are key players, so maintaioning that relationship is vital and we take that very seriously.” Three years into Auckland Pride, has any work or planning been done on the basis of sustaining the parade and festival should ATEED not stay on board? “That's a big part of my kaupapa. Already by not having charitable status we're already hemorrhaging around a third of our income, and that's just how it works when you pay tax. So rather than just try to claw and drag money in let's just stop losing it. For me that's a quick fix in a lot of ways. And getting charitable status also opens the doors to a range of other money, both from sponsors, larger organisations and business, because once you become charitable you become attractive to them because it's a tax write-off and they get a big chunk of their money back so they're very happy to hand that money out. And international companies based here are required by law to give 'x' percentage of their profits back to charitable entities in this country. So we're quite keen to capitalise on that.” “And it also opens the doors up to other funders such as Creative NZ. We are already eligible to go to those guys but only within certain parameters due to the nature of our constitution... so once we've had that corrected those parameters open and we're able to get more money.” Is there a 'plan b' ready for if ATEED doesn't stay on board? “For us as a board that is an area that we have been driving really hard. A lot of work has been done on tiering sponsorship and funding support and breaking that down to pieces that are applicable in a variety of formats. There's certainly quite a large database of places to go in terms of funders and agencies and businesses and we are staring to get into that, and I've worked in event management for years now and I am starting to think how can we leverage off my personal networks and relationships. And that's Vinnie [Sykes]'s area of expertise, he's the marketing guy, he's worked very hard to start pulling in chunks of money. That work has begun. So we can get smart about when we apply and how we apply and who to go to. Any organisation that relies on one anchorstone of money is an organisation that isn't going to be around long.” Could the Auckland Pride Parade happen in 2017 without ATEED funding? “I think that the parade would absolutely go ahead. I think the size and scale of it will always shift according to the amount of money that comes in.” If the parade is scaled down what effect would that have on the overall Pride Festival, given that the Parade is the most high-profile and iconic part of the festival? “The work that Ta'i [Paitai] has done in terms of his networking is enormous, above and beyond what he's being paid for and we're very grateful for that... I think all of our contractors are in that same boat. His network's a killer. Just because people may not know him doesn't mean that his work's not tight. He's worked very, very extensively in the performing arts arena, for a variety of organisations like museums and art galleries, and I think that what he's started to do is to turn the festival into much more of an umbrella. In a perfect world we would drive the festival and the parade only and the other elements would beging to be taken over by the community.” Auckland Pride's membership is limited to fifteen people maximum. Some of those are so-called 'Consultant Members' who weren't consulted much, if at all, in the earlier stages of Pride's development. Why does Pride have a model where a community organisation has a very tightly constricted membership who were largely ignored and where no one knew who they were until the media asked? “My best practice position for any organisation that works for the community is a more open model. That is something I was surprised by and I can understand the rationale, I've seen this before and typically organisations will grow out of it. What happens is that you create your project and you close shop while you're trying to build it. You don't want to open yourself up to people who potentially have a huge heart and care for the project don't have a lot of skill around how it should get delivered. If you have an open model in those early stages those people can come in and upset the apple cart without understanding completely what's taking place. I'm not sure if that's what's happened here but certainly that's what I've seen out in the larger world. At that point the organisation needs to make a decision once it's up and running. You're looking at three to five years for a project like this to go through its growing pains. It's only in year five and six that a project of this scale and ambition really starts to hit its stride. I believe we're still in that infancy stage.” “My position has been clear from the beginning, I want us to move to charitable status, to have an open membership.” “The other path for an organisation that reaches this point is that it will continue in a profit-making vein, that it will turn itself into a full business or a full company run like an executive board and run off in that direction.” Jay Bennie - 21st December 2015