Our Team

Margaret Bolton 

Voluntary & Community Sector Policy

Margaret Bolton is an independent consultant specialising in third sector policy. She has undertaken consultancy projects for a range of organisations including Arts Council England, Youth Music and the Cabinet Office. Previously, Margaret was Communications Director at Arts Council England. She moved from this job to be Director of Policy and Research at the National Council of Voluntary Organisations. She led the organisation's work on charity law reform and was subsequently seconded to the review of charities and the wider not-for-profit sector at the Prime Minister's Strategy Unit. As a consultant she specialises in work on social investment and third sector capacity building. Together with Meg Abdy she has undertaken a number of projects on third sector capacity building. She wrote Foundations and social investment – making money work harder for a group of foundations including Esmee Fairbairn. She also produced a study of European foundations and social investment for the European Foundation Centre. She co-authored with David Carrington the MMM report New and Alternative Financial Instruments. She is a board member of Capacitybuilders. She has been a Visiting Scholar at Columbia University in New York, and a Senior Research Scholar at Yale Law School.

Clare Cooper

MMM Director & co-founder

Clare has an extensive career in arts management which started with the British Council in 1981. From 1991 to 2003 she specialised in development with a portfolio of diverse clients the largest of which was Laban where she led the development of their award winning Hertzog & de Meuron building. In 1999 she moved to set up the capital campaign for Hampstead Theatre's new building. In 2001, she joined Arts & Business first taking the role of Director of Development and then becoming their first Director of Policy & Communications. She left A&B in 2005 to set up the third phase of MMM. She has served as a Trustee on the Boards of a number of arts organisations and higher education institutions over the last fifteen years but is now focusing her volunteering in broader community settings. Clare is a co-founder MMM. She was born and brought up in East Africa and currently lives and works part of the time in Scotland and part of the time in London.

Mark Robinson

Organisational Resilience

Mark Robinson is the founder and Director of Thinking Practice, a consultancy dedicated to increasing the impact and resilience of the arts and cultural sector through the creative use of analysis, planning, facilitation and coaching. He is the author or Making adaptive Resilience Real, (Arts Council England, 2010) and has given keynotes and workshops on the subject across the UK and in Canada. He was previously Executive Director of Arts Council England, North East, where he worked for 10 years. Amongst his national roles for Arts Council England, he chaired Art Co Limited, the trading company which oversaw the phenomenal growth of Own Art and Take It Away, innovative ways of developing arts engagement and economy. Prior to that, Mark worked in community and adult education, literature and arts development, most notably as Director of Cleveland Arts. He has published academic research in community and literature development, arts and health and arts and regional identity. His first career was 6 years as a Head Chef in vegetarian restaurants. He is also a widely published and award-winning poet, editor and critic, with several collections published, and widely anthologised. New poems will appear in bi-lingual English/Bulgarian versions in 2010, part of an ongoing collaboration with leading Bulgarian poets. He founded and edited Scratch poetry magazine and press for 9 years. He is the chair of the Swallows Foundation UK and a Fellow of the Royal Society for the Arts.

Siân Prime

Cultural and Creative Entrepreneurship

Siân is the Course Director for Goldsmith’s MA in Cultural and Creative Entrepreneurship and teaches on the MA Social Entrepreneurship, based in the Institute of Creative and Cultural Entreprenuership. She has developed skills as a trainer, facilitator, coach and consultant.  Siân has worked for Natverkstan and Globalverkstan in Goteborg, IIMB in Bangalore, the GoDown, Nairobi and East Afrida region and nationally for the Arts Council England, the National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts and for the Cultural Enterprise Office, Scotland. She’s also worked within a number of sub-regions to deliver business advice, training and coaching for social innovation start-ups, creative individuals and organisations.  She worked with the original Creative Pioneer Team at NESTA and was responsible for the content and delivery of The Academy – NESTA’s residential enterprise development programme for highly talented creative individuals to move their creative thinking to founding an innovative business; she has since developed the material for Insight Out and Starter for Six which now is delivered without her by Regional and National Development Agencies and supports the creation of new creative and social enterprises. More recently Siân has developed a new programme “You mean I’m in charge” for the Entrepreneurs as Leaders strand of the Cultural Leadership Programme, in England. This has been designed for creatives who have established a business and are now facing the challenges of leading an organisation, rather than a project. 

Hannah Rudman

Digital & Environment

Hannah Rudman, director of Rudman Consulting, has been working through independent consultancy for the creative, cultural, charitable and tourism sectors in the UK since 2001.  Hannah advises on cultural policy development around digital development and environmental sustainability, and speaks internationally and regularly on these themes at cultural sector conferences. Rudman Consulting created AmbITion: a £3m+ change programme for nations and regions that utilises IT and digital developments to facilitate the longer-term sustainability of arts organisations. She is currently Specialist Advisor in Digital to the Cultural Enterprise Office and Associate to TEAM Tourism Consulting China. Hannah is also Arts Professional’s 'Harnessing IT' columnist; a lecturer in the School of Computing at Edinburgh Napier University; and on the board of New Media Scotland. She is also founding director of Envirodigital, a company that helps organisations create truly economically and ecologically sustainable digital developments.

Holly Tebbutt 

Organisational Development

Holly Tebbutt brings over twenty years’ experience working with arts and cultural organisations, covering a spectrum from the needs of individual artists to strategic development within national museums. After graduating from the RCA in 1989 she ran a craft and design development programme in the Southern Arts region delivering commissions, collections and exhibition development,residencies and participatory programmes with the museum, arts and education sectors.In her capacity as Head of Visual Arts (London Arts, Arts Council England) she worked closely with every major visual arts gallery and agency in the region and developed expertise in grant funding approaches as well as a detailed understanding of the business models and development issues facing arts organisations. She specialised in capacity building, sector consultation and review, achieving a strategic framework to secure permanent, affordable studios for artists in London and commissioning a comprehensive artists’ advisory service:Artquest. During her time at London Arts she also contributed to a number of national reviews of the visual arts sector including the Elford Review and Spaces & Places and in 2002 led a national policy forum on behalf of ACE to examine structural and funding arrangements for artist’s film, video and digital media in response to the creation of Film London and UKFC. From the arts funding sector she transferred to Goldsmiths College where she was responsible for leading a strategic review of the BA Textiles programme to improve quality standards, introduce professional practice and preparing for the introduction of modular pathways inart and design across all undergraduate programmes. Recently, through her consultancy work, she has undertaken research into key sector trends in the arts, conducted business planning exercises at a range of scales and delivered merger modelling. She also provides conference design and management services - most recently on collaborative working and the role of digital technologies in visual artists’ practice and regularly evaluates art in the public realm projects and artists residencies. More widely she has carried out project management and service design work for Skills-Third Sector and NCVO.  During  2009 and 2010 through Mission, Models, Money (MMM), she facilitated collaborative practice among a range  of arts and cultural organisations in Newcastle Gateshead and carried out strategic research into business model innovation (see Capital Matters 2010). She is currently Commissioning Editor for artiststalkmoney.ning.com, co-designer of MMM’s re.volution programme (2011) and Chair of londonprintstudio.

Shelagh Wright

Shelagh was born and raised in West Bengal of Scottish heritage.  She describes herself as a ‘mongrel’ and is engaged with a diverse range of people and projects around the world on cultural and creative economy policy and sustainable practice. She has worked extensively with government and the public, charitable and private sectors on creativity, social enterprise, investment and innovation agendas and is an associate of the think tank Demos. A co-director of Mission Models Money (MMM), her publications include 'After the Crunch – the creative economy in recession'; 'So.What Do You Do? A new question for policy in the Creative Age', 'Making Good Work' and 'Design for Learning'; in addition to articles and papers on creative enterprise, creative clusters, skills and investment policy. Shelagh has led programmes of work with the British Council, Creative and Cultural Sector Skills Council, Screen England, Arts Council England, Creative Partnerships, was a contributor to the Creative Britain strategy and a member of the EU Expert Working Group on the Creative Industries. She is also a Director of ThreeJohnsandShelagh (with John Holden, John Kieffer and John Newbigin) and an associate of the Culture+Conflict initiative.