The Big Idea Charitable Trust
The Big Idea | Te Aria Nui story
The Big Idea | Te Aria Nui is where people find the tools, networks, opportunities and inspiration to grow their "big ideas" into viable careers, projects and businesses in the creative sector. And if you want to see how we celebrate, profile and tell the world about their successes, then look no further.
Visitors to The Big Idea website experience a comprehensive understanding of the sector than ever before. This is achieved through features that include employment opportunity listings, up-to-date industry news and showcasing of members' profiles.
Centred around delivering a constant source of vital, current information, The Big Idea signals changing trends and shifts across all segments of New Zealand's creative community.
But in its beginnings, The Big Idea was itself another 'big idea' fuelled by enthusiasm, passion and ideas just waiting to happen.
How it all started
Back in 2000, a group of organisations working in partnership and known as the Auckland Arts Work Project presented a bold plan to invent an online networking and communications tool: a new website to be called The Big Idea. Earlier that year, as part of a visionary strategy to expand work and income opportunities for creative practitioners, the group had launched Arts Work Navigator, an email-based bulletin board that quickly attracted subscribers looking for work in Auckland's creative sector.
The Arts Work Project recognised the shortcomings of the creative sector; that there were common issues of 'lumpy income', unsteady employment and network-based disadvantages for artists and practitioners in the industry. So, they set to work on a suite of projects to make a difference.
In 2001, The Big Idea | Te Aria Nui website was launched by Prime Minister, Rt Hon Helen Clark. Not only did it increase accessibility for work and income opportunities, but it also allowed straightforward navigation around the creative industries.
For the very first time, individuals, organisations and companies in the creative sector could identify and relate to each other in one, online home. The website connected people, allowing important networks to develop on personal, local, regional and international levels. Creative talent could now link with industry, science, commerce, health or agriculture and The Big Idea could actively promote the building of relationships across sectors.
About The Big Idea Trust
The Big Idea Trust was established in 2003 to continue the work of Arts Work Project long-term. Its guiding strategy is to drive creativity into all sectors of New Zealand society.
The Big Idea Charitable Trust has three main purposes:
- To support emerging and established arts practitioners in New Zealand’s creative sector affected by high levels of under-employment and low income-generation
- To design and deliver innovative services, tools and programmes (delivered on-line and ‘face-to-face’) that support practitioners and organisations in New Zealand's creative community to access and utilise the resources they need to meet their creative, professional and sustainability goals and milestones, and
- To drive creativity into all sectors of New Zealand society by being an enabler and a broker of community-based ventures that create real outcomes, opportunities, connections and networks for creative practitioners and their communities.
What does the Trust do?
Servicing a broadly based artistic/creative community, the Trust has two iprojects underway:
- TBI Web (http://www.thebigidea.co.nz) is the online home of New Zealand’s creative community offering job and opportunity listings, industry information, news, tools, practitioner profiles, forums, networking spaces, market-places and much more in support of emerging and established creative practitioners and the people wanting to connect with them.
- TBI Junction is a proposed centre of excellence in Auckland that will bring the arts, business, education and investment communities together in one place to back innovative and enterprising creative people and their ideas into local and global markets.
The Trust’s projects are based in the Auckland region and to develop and grow them, the Trust works in partnership with a range of organisations throughout New Zealand.
Behind The Big Idea logo
| A navigation device | The Mattang There were no maps for our Polynesian and European ancestors who travelled to the ends of the earth. They looked to the stars. They studied their environment and built their own wayfinding tools like the mattang. Similarly, unlike other areas in the economy, there are few established career paths in the creative sector. People need to build their own path to navigate a creative career that includes their skills, talent, experiences as well as beliefs and passion. The polynesian mattang seemed a great metaphor for understanding how creative careers and businesses are built. Our mattang is a navigation tool for all in the creative sector. |
| Our logo People working in the creative industries need ways to communicate and align with one another. For all those people finding their way around the creative sector, The Big Idea aims to be a definitive and trustworthy navigation tool, of immeasurable, lasting usefulness. Through the Internet, with all its possibilities as an immense territory of collaboration, The Big Idea effortlessly gathers together the creative community, visibly connecting people with industries, both locally and globally. |
