The Idealist

A former technophobe is the driving force behind New Zealand's largest online creative community.


The archetype of the struggling artist had endured for centuries, but Elisabeth Vaneveld was convinced she could make it obsolete – with a little help from some like-minded friends.

Like many in the creative sector, Elisabeth had spent years living from irregular paycheque to irregular paycheque, relying on tins of beans, packs of noodles and such, to fuel her creative endeavours.

While her current role as a senior manager with Creative New Zealand had provided her first-ever regular wage, she had many creative friends and acquaintances who struggled to make ends meet, despite possessing real talent and putting in ridiculously long hours.

For Elisabeth, who, in 1999, had clocked up close to two decades as a strategist and project manager within the creative and public sectors, it just didn’t make sense. She couldn’t see why so many so-called right-brain thinkers seemed to believe they had to suffer for their art and earn less than their left-brain peers.

So when Creative New Zealand, the national arts development agency, decided to pursue new professional development opportunities for creatives, Elisabeth seized her own opportunity.

“I knew most creative practitioners were significantly under-employed, but I felt we couldn’t fall back on government work schemes and that sort of thing. I, together with several other very good friends and colleagues, decided we needed to find a way to help creative people connect with each other and promote their skills and services to other sectors of society.”
Well aware of the enormity of the challenge they had set themselves, Elisabeth and her team enlisted the help of several other groups within the creative and business sectors and together they formed the Auckland Arts Work Project. Its self-decreed mission: to invent an online portal capable of connecting creative individuals and organisations throughout New Zealand and beyond.

Typically cash-strapped, the group decided it couldn’t afford a custom-built website so opted instead for an e-newsletter.

Unusually for the time, the e-newsletter, Arts Work Navigator, had a strong editorial voice, with news, views, features and profiles as well as job and opportunity listings. Readers were encouraged to provide feedback and content of their own and so create a truly interactive online community.

“It was ahead of its time in terms of how people were using the internet space in the creative sector,” Elisabeth says. “We knew from the start it needed to be much more than a set of directories. We wanted people to turn to it for advice and inspiration. This made things difficult financially but it proved to be instrumental to the project’s success.”
The group fired off the e-newsletter to their network of creative contacts and met with an overwhelmingly positive response.

Buoyed by this popular success and their own fundraising efforts, the group set up a dedicated website in 2002 which they named ‘The Big Idea – Te Aria Nui’. Launched by then Prime Minister Helen Clark, who recognised its potential importance to the creative economy, the site was a veritable instant hit, attracting interest from creatives of all persuasions at home and abroad.

Billing itself as the online home of New Zealand’s creative community, the site provides a digital infrastructure for creatives, enabling them to create online profiles, showcase their portfolios, commission and find work, connect with others and catch up on the latest news and views … we could go on.

The site’s popularity has continued to surge and it now attracts many tens of thousands of visitors a month and has more than 22,000 members.

In 2003, Creative New Zealand established a charitable trust to manage the site, of which Elisabeth is the executive director. Its broad mission statement is to help creatives grow their ‘big ideas’ into viable projects, careers and businesses; develop innovative online resources to help them do so; and drive creativity into all sectors of society.

While the trust receives some public funding, Elisabeth and her team must raise most of the money they need to fulfil these objectives themselves. It’s a responsibility Elisabeth feels a personal as well as professional duty to uphold. In 2006, she quit her salaried position with Creative New Zealand to focus on TBI full-time, saying she felt “a moral obligation” to make it the very best it could be.

Having run a successful consultancy practice in Melbourne for eight years, she decided to assemble a small team to take on contract work to raise funds, now known as TBI Assist.
One of TBI Assist’s biggest, and most successful, projects to-date is the Art Venture programme, which Elisabeth oversees on behalf of the Arts Regional Trust (ART). Now in its third year, the programme aims to accelerate creative entrepreneurs by connecting them with peers and mentors and helping them develop sustainable business models.

Although TBI Assist generates significant funding from contract work, the trust has had to develop additional revenue streams en route, as Elisabeth puts it, “to growing a sustainable economic base for its ventures”.

For Elisabeth, TBI’s success reflects a global shift from an information age, which primarily values objects, to a conceptual age, which primarily values ideas.

She references the book A Whole New Mind by American author David Pink (a former speechwriter for Al Gore), who argues that right-brain thinkers will soon dominate business in the West – a consequence of our increasingly digitalised world where more and more jobs are outsourced.

Elisabeth says: “Pink points out that in the US, and it won’t be long before we see the same thing here, corporate recruiters are now targeting top arts graduate schools in search of talent. The Master of Fine Arts (MFA) is now one of the hottest credentials in the world. The MFA is the new MBA.”

Born in Dunedin, the eldest of five daughters, to Dutch immigrant parents, Elisabeth recalls a somewhat despondent childhood.

“My parents never really overcame the war trauma of their adolescence and early 20s and so our household was not a joyful one,” she says.

The family relocated to Canada when Elisabeth was 11 – a move she says made her feel more isolated than ever.

“My reaction when I was about 12 and not settling at all well into the remote town we’d moved to was to formulate a very ambitious plan,” she explains. “I decided I would work part-time throughout high school and save enough money to return to New Zealand as soon as I graduated. Dare I say, that is exactly what I did.”

Arriving in Auckland on a Friday morning, the then 18-year-old managed to land a job that afternoon as a receptionist for an engineering firm, starting the following Monday. Moving into a flat full of tertiary arts students in Ponsonby soon afterwards, she discovered her ‘heart-based calling to the arts’.

“Quite serendipitously, I fell in with a crowd of lively, ideas-driven people who lived in the buzz of the contemporary creative culture of the day. We got to thinking about arts projects we could collaborate on and, after a while, I realised I was a pretty good organiser and really enjoyed that type of work.”

Elisabeth landed her first creative sector role with the University of Auckland at age 23 and has never looked back. She says she feels “truly privileged” to have enjoyed such a long and fruitful career in the industry, attributing her success to passion, persistence, and the ability to build successful partnerships.

Right now, however, Elisabeth is focusing her attentions on establishing a new Auckland-based centre to be known as TBI Junction which will aim to help creative entrepreneurs market their skills and services at home and abroad.

Creative solutions:

Elisabeth’s advice to budding creative entrepreneurs:

• If you’re really passionate about a creative pursuit, go for it. Ensure your path crosses with people who will be willing to help you.

• Ensure your technical skills are second-to-none. True creativity comes from being able to apply these skills in interesting new ways.

• Expand your networks. Seek advice and assistance from those with different skills.

• Interruptions aren’t necessarily a bad thing. My daily interactions with people give me enjoyment and often present new possibilities.

• Adopt a holistic approach to life and remember it has its own flow – there will be periods of intense stress and happiness. When challenges become too great, forget your pride and bring others into the problem. The results will be worth it in the end.
Lorna Thornber
www.thebigidea.co.nz