What the craft sector needs from leaders

Deirdre Figueiredo: "The Crafts Leadership Network is a group of people who are based in organisations around the country, and we've come together to try to form a collective strategic voice for craft. The strength of the network is that it involves people from right across the sector, so you have in there people who are involved with retail, with private galleries, with public and local authority galleries, you have a craft development agency, you have a university gallery, so there's a brilliant range across the crafts, which I think is very representative. We feel that our role is very much around connectivity and connecting the sector in a way that hasn't really been done before.

"There are some really key issues facing the craft sector at the moment. Some of those are around further education and higher education, and the crisis around the closure of many crafts courses and the whole direction that that is taking, so I think that needs some collective thinking about. I also think we rely on the sole trader model a lot in this country, so I think one of our tasks is to look at other models and ways of working that are maybe about social enterprise. We're quite excited about looking at ideas around crowdsourcing and crowdfunding, for example, so we can develop interesting support mechanisms for the crafts that use the web and use those technologies to develop a strong following.

"We need more critical thought leadership, so more opportunities to write, to speak, to be seen outside of our sector as well, across different platforms. I think we also need to be trying to develop that support for crafts which is political, and leaders need to be well-versed in doing some of that advocacy and persuasion, and acting together to influence policy at the highest level.