New CHART CEO

“The board of CHART (Culture Heritage and Arts Resource Trust) is delighted to announce the appointment of Chris Carey to lead CHART forward.

CHART serves the culture, heritage and arts sector (s) of the Whangarei District and will work with organisations, individuals and groups within the sector to raise the profile of arts heritage and culture in Whangarei, to further the art of collaboration across the sector and to deliver some great results for the sector and the communities of Whangarei.

“The Board are delighted to have Chris on board” says Andy Britton, the chair of CHART, “Chris brings well established relationships with individuals and groups within the sector, an understanding of the whole Taapapa Toi Strategy and the CHART research process (based on his involvement from the start) and a well known entrepreneurial way of making things happen for Whangarei.”

Chris is a sculptor and designer, was one of the founders of the Burning Issues business at the town basin and most recently worked at NorthTec leading the Applied Arts team. In the past few years the Applied Arts team has succeeded both in raising the standard of the work of graduating students and in running profitable arts courses for NorthTec. Chris will now bring his business management skills, his ability to deliver financially viable business outcomes and his experience of delivering innovative solutions to CHART.”

Background on CHART

CHART is the Culture Heritage and Arts Resource Trust for the Whangarei District. It has been established following a research process in 2009/2010 which worked with ten culture, heritage and arts organisations across the sector to consider what sort of organisation would best serve the sector in raising its own internal standards of governance and delivering great outcomes to its communities. The organisations were: Whangarei Youth Music, Waipu museum, Kiwi North, the Whangarei Art Museum, SMAC dance company, NSA/Reyburn House, Northland Society of Authors, the Hihiaua project, Northland Youth Theatre and the Quarry Arts Centre.

As a follow up to the Taapapa Toi consultation process APT lobbied the WDC to find a way to move some key ideas from that process forward. These included the concept of a Culture Heritage and Arts resource trust which could serve the whole sector and create, encourage and support a culture of collaboration across the sector which would deliver better outcomes for the sector and for the ratepayers and the community who fund a lot of these entities.

The WDC allocated some research funding to the process.

Each organisation completed a questionnaire and interview process which considered what sort of benefits collaboration might confer on the organisation itself and on its members and communities. Questions topics included: which governance model does your organisation use, through an assessment of its financial position and management to a section on its aspirations and vision for the future.

The questionnaire and interview results were collated and the organisations came together for two days of workshops to consider the findings, work on some specific identified ideas and to develop some strategic objectives for a Culture Heritage and Arts Resource Trust.

Subsequent meetings have fine tuned the sort of affiliation and governance models which the sector wishes to see implemented by the new Trust and a broader meeting to which the whole sector/ arts and heritage community were invited looked at how this sector can offer an arts culture and heritage brand to Whangarei: creating our city and district as an arts, culture and heritage destination.

During the research process Mary Britton ( working as CEO for APT and as the CHART leader ) visited Hamilton and New Plymouth to learn from cities which have created a brand based on Arts and Cultural outcomes how they have worked towards their current reputation as places where visitors can enjoy arts, culture and heritage experiences. There is a lot of support from around New Zealand for the CHART process in Whangarei. Whilst there is no “one size fits all” method to turn a city into a desirable place to live and a well known destination for visitors there are some fundamentals in such a process which Whangarei can learn from.

The Chart Team also met with several key funding bodies, including the ASB and the Oxford Trust who advised that without collaboration and planning it is difficult for funders to differentiate which is the right project to support: individual organisations may all be “fighting” for the same pool of funding and their projects seem to be seeking to deliver similar outcomes. These funders encouraged the model of cross-organisation collaboration as this sort of planning and cooperation allows them to allocate major resources to projects with confidence that the whole sector and district have planned for and are working together to deliver identified community needs.

The sector and CHART are now planning to create an agreed schedule of major arts, culture and heritage infrastructure projects to allow the whole sector to support a programme which will deliver new facilities to Whangarei as each individual organisation supports the other in major funding applications.

The WDC have agreed to fund CHART.

CHART is also funded by NRC (and other sources) to deliver Regional Arts Development. This work is delivered by Creative Northland.

CHART also owns the shares of Old Library Ltd – a charitable limited company which operates Old Library.