Inside Out

One of my first bosses when I started my career off in banking was an incredible lesbian woman. She was probably the most important influence on my own thinking about myself, and made me think that I could achieve many things, regardless of what people thought about my private life. She was the catalyst that said, ‘You should be doing something more compelling and fun that you’re more interested in’.

Originally I either wanted to be a social worker or somebody that worked on something that made a difference to other people. But I happened to find myself in banking and I did pretty well. Then, in relatively quick succession, both my father and my grandfather died. Both men would have been a big influence on me in terms of career focus, which made me kind of pause and think maybe now’s the time just to go in a different direction. So, I went back to college and did an MA in Cultural Policy and Arts Management.

I now run a website called FundIt.ie which has got incredible examples of LGBT+ projects. Over the last six years most people in Ireland of a certain age have found it very difficult to find sources of finance for their creative pursuits. We’ve lost a lot of people – they’ve gone and moved to different countries. The people that are here are pioneers of new technology. A lot of the LGBT+ Community who would be ahead of the curb would have said: ‘We can do this. We’ve got an audience and they like what we do, and we’re going to make something. So, let’s go to them and ask them if they’d help us.’

About 30 years ago a group of people in business were at a point in time where they were getting lots of requests from artists and arts organisations. It was back when sponsorship commissioning was becoming more active amongst corporate Ireland. They decided that they couldn’t respond to the demand that was there; they didn’t have the budget, so they thought they would create an organisation that would advocate for more companies to get involved, and now 30 years later Business to Arts is an organisation of about 300 different members from all over Ireland.

Overall our mission is to try and encourage businesses to sponsor, to commission artists in different ways. My job is to lead that mission. It’s a charitable organisation and it tries to get as many diverse sources of funds for arts and culture as possible, and advocate from all sources of funds, from government to businesses to individuals all having the capacity to help things happen. Sometimes that’s as simple as going, ‘Here’s some money, just go and do your thing,’ and other times it’s something very specific that they want to do. Both are fun.

There’s a growing movement in corporate Ireland which relates to equality and diversity, which has been probably more visible as result of the marriage equality campaign. Companies realise and understand that their workforces are diverse and different. They are made up of LGBT+ people, and of lots of other types of people that might not necessarily categorise themselves in any way, but they realised that LGBT+ is part of the make-up of their companies. Particularly if they’re a large company, they want to reflect the interests of their employees and make them an embraced part of the workforce, equivalent to their peers with the same opportunities.

I see what a lot of the companies that I work with do in the LGBT+ space, companies like Accenture. They’ve done great work with GAZE film festival for the last five years. They’ve also done Women on Walls, a portrait campaign to make female scientists visible in the Royal Irish Academy. It’s about representing everyone that works for them, and in the Royal Irish Academy all the portraits were of men. Accenture said this is what we’d like, so we’ll commission and create these beautiful art works.

My husband is a creative person. He has incredible ideas, he has longevity in his career and he has an incredibly loyal audience. Every week he performs on television in front of hundreds of thousands of people, and then several hundred in The George. I’m incredibly proud of him and his success in entertainment, which is a very tough business. He’s a one man/one woman enterprise who makes people happy. He also makes people mad, but that’s inevitable if you’re in the public eye. You’ve got the lovers and the haters, so my job is to love him and support him and to try and make sure that he feels like he’s happy with that as well.

We met 18 years ago in The Red Box. He was stalking me for ages, but we met and we’ve a great, very fun relationship. We got married a year after the marriage equality bill passed, so we took our time. We’ve been 16 years waiting to get married, so I think we’ve done the right thing now. As our families put it, it makes them all happier that we’re now a family as well.

Trust becomes a much more important thing when you move into the non-profit sector. You have to be open and transparent, and tell people who you really are. In order to work with people really well, they need to trust you and to trust your ability to deliver. As chief executive of an small organisation with a great team, I would never be as strong if I didn’t have the support of my husband or my family, or people that have brought me to that point. They’re all part of my success story: my team, my family, my husband, all of my influences in various different ways.

Interview by Aoife O’Connor. Find out more about Business to Arts at businesstoarts.ie