Our Vision and Values
A values led organisation, this is what we stand for:
Our Core Purpose
To deliver inspirational opportunities so that people want to engage with culture and the creative economy.
Our Vision
The Guildhall Trust will become a leading cultural organisation which places our communities at the centre of everything we do so that we can inspire, entertain and transform lives.
Our Mission
The Guildhall Trust is committed to investing our skills and resources so that we can deliver cultural and learning experiences of the highest quality whilst becoming increasingly more resilient and sustainable.
Our Values
- To Educate – to promote the arts and our heritage to support local education through performance and creative participation
- To Inspire – to inspire our communities through our work and our passion for culture.
- To Collaborate – we work and develop partnerships so that we can achieve more together.
- To Develop – to develop our people so that they contribute more towards our success.
- To Diversify – to develop and diversify our offer, developing our audience and engaging with our community.
Community Statement
As a charity, it is the vision of The Guildhall Trust to become one of the country’s leading cultural organisations which places its communities at the centre of everything it does to inspire, entertain and transform lives.
We are committed to developing The White Rock as a vibrant, multi-faceted asset for Hastings and the East Sussex region, and for the venue to be a cultural hub for the community in the heart of the town.
The venue is home to some fantastic key community concerts and events of the Hastings calendar, and we have been working to develop our relationships and work with the organisers of these important events to ensure their continued growth and success.
This said, unlike the previous operators, The Guildhall Trust is not receiving a subsidy to run the venue. This means that we need to ensure we are meeting our costs and generating income to secure the long-term viability of the venue and make the improvements that the community is telling us they would like to see. We need to generate £25,000 turnover every week just to cover our core costs which include staffing and energy bills!
We have set a very competitive commercial hire rate for the venue to try and attract new promoters and tempt back promoters who had stopped coming to the White Rock, which will offer customers an improved quality of programme and provide greater commercial success in the coming years.
For our community and charity partners, we offer a greatly discounted rate which we believe is fair and much lower than comparable venues across the industry.
Without external subsidy, we are not able to sustain some of the rates that were previously possible. Whilst at first we honoured as many previous agreements as possible, we found that on some of these events we came nowhere close to covering the venue’s costs and actually made significant losses, which clearly can’t continue.
These are not easy conversations to have, but we are talking to our community and charity event partners to move forward. Condensing the time in venue to reduce staff costs, flexibility on dates so we can programme events into quieter, less commercially demanded times of the year and exploring alternative sources of funding for events are all things to consider.
Ultimately, as the White Rock nears its Centenary year, we all want the same thing which is to secure the future and sustainability of the venue as an asset for, and to be used, by the community, and are we keen to work with our community partners to achieve this.