Spotlight on Jimena Lara, Chief Culture and Social Impact Officer, The Anglo Mexican Foundation

Recognizing that the Anglo Mexican Foundation is over 75 years old (turning 80 in 2024), do you plan to return to your usual way of doing business, or has the past year given your organization an opportunity to rethink and retool?

The Covid-19 pandemic has represented an obligatory moment to rethink the work the Foundation has been doing over the past years. In Anglo Arts, we’ve used this time to deeply examine our work, identify and maintain much of the solid programme we’ve developed for the last decades, and let go of or transform what needs to be adapted to today’s challenges.

The Anglo Mexican Foundation started a transformation path not long before the pandemic hit Mexico, so we were already diving deep into our role as an educational and cultural non-profit institution. We had just started to work on our social impact model and more specifically, the way to accurately produce social impact indicators to measure the work that we carry out and quantify the results of our cultural programmes, their relevance to our stakeholders, and how they benefit society.

The pandemic has pushed us into being more innovative and creative, to find new ways to reach our audiences, and redesign our programmes, all within the challenge of the sudden digital offer overload. The pandemic has brought the following insights:

• It has made us look closer at the local scene. Part of the work we focus on is how to contribute to the strengthening of the local Arts ecosystem. We have a specific focus on social impact through the performing arts, carefully looking at the communities we serve.
• We have looked deeper within our own organization. Our Foundation has vast experience in bicultural education from kindergarten to graduate programmes through the Churchill School & College, and the Anglo Institute of Education, as well as teaching English and Spanish as foreign languages at The Anglo. We are finding ways to connect more meaningfully with our peers and to ensure the arts are closely linked to our academic opportunities. We are focusing on developing new audiences from our own student community, made up of predominantly centennials and millennials.
• The past year has increased our awareness of the importance of developing long-term, deep strategic partnerships. More than ever, it is crucial to collaborate with other cultural institutions in order to strengthen the cultural sector.
• These challenging months allowed us to develop a model that embraces different resources such as digital workshops or masterclasses in addition to showcasing and to operating in a way that fosters stronger relationships between artists, institutions, and countries.
• The educational component has become one of our leading practices. We were invited by prominent British conductor Rebecca Miller to participate in her Beyond Borders initiative, granting three Mexican conductors' scholarships to participate in a digital seminar led by her, focusing on discussing gender inequalities in the industry, among other topics. We introduced a strategic binational programme with Universidad Panamericana where members of the British Shakespeare Sinfonia Orchestra mentor a group of Mexican student musicians through online tutorials. This gave the university’s orchestra an opportunity to enhance their curriculum by working with professional British musicians which would not have been available in usual conditions. We will continue this partnership even after the lockdown is lifted. As a result of the pandemic, we’re undergoing, along with our partners, a collective reinvention of the ways in which we present concerts, theater, and workshops.

How has the pandemic influenced your ability to connect across cultures?

Working closely with the UK, the pandemic has given us the chance to work together on a different scale. We used to bring UK culture to Mexico and Mexican culture to the UK via travel but being able to collaborate remotely has allowed for a more inclusive way of working, both inside and outside the organization. In a way, it levels the field, invites the whole team’s participation, and democratizes the workplace. We experienced a boost of motivation, creativity, and productivity within the team. For example, although we missed the human connection of participating in the live edition of the ISPA congress, the Virtual Edition: 2021 ISPA Congress made it easier to connect and interact with colleagues who are in different parts of the world without having to leave our office work behind. It allowed more of us to attend (rather than send a sole representative) and participate in the conversation, plus there were cost savings, and it had very little, if any, environmental impact. We think this is one of the main aspects that should remain after the lockdown, at least in a hybrid format.

It has given us the opportunity to develop new digital performing arts projects, allowing us to relate and build on another level with our partners. For example, the new partnership between Shakespeare Sinfonia and the Universidad Panamericana allows both countries to participate in projects remotely while generating large-scale impact for all participants involved.

How have you overcome the travel limitations that the pandemic has created and succeeded in your mission to bring Mexican programming to the UK and vice versa?

We have been able to present Mexican artists and events online in the UK. For example, Mexican jazz musician Tino Contreras performed online at La Linea, the London Latin Music Festival from the Frida Kahlo Museum in Mexico City. On the other hand, UK artists, workshops, and performances have been presented digitally in Mexico. For example, live from London at the Festival Internacional Cervantino and Ian Wooldridge’s workshop from the UK for students in the Shakespeare Competition. In a certain way the pandemic has helped us to see travel limitations as opportunities to develop new programmes and generally, it has invited performing arts institutions to rethink live events. Live performance will always be essential to fully experience the Arts, but we can’t ignore the needs of new audiences and their cultural consumption habits, or how the pandemic has shaped them. We have to learn more about these ways of consumption in order to remain relevant to new audiences, specifically those who were unaccustomed to experiencing the arts live prior to the pandemic. What can we adapt from the pandemic and incorporate into our programmes for them to be more inclusive, more democratic, and with more capacity for outreach?

Generally, the pandemic has taken us through a bittersweet transition process. We’ve experienced financial difficulties just like everyone else in the cultural industry, but we have also taken this time to critically reflect on the work of our organization and how it impacts our stakeholders, and discovered innovative and creative ways to identify and develop new projects and partnerships. More than ever, it has helped us understand how we, as part of a Foundation, can strategically contribute to strengthening the Arts sector through our social impact programmes.