D+G ahead of the curve??

At the end of last week Creative Scotland boss Andrew Dixon announced that our national arts body would be scrapping the £7M per annum funding programme that CS have used to provide core running costs to arts organisations (full story here). The 'Flexible Funding' programme currently supports organisations such as Transmission gallery , Celtic Connections, the GI festival of contemporary art and the CCA in Glasgow, Inverleith House and Edinburgh Printmakers in Edinburgh, as well as Cove Park, the Festival Fringe, NVA, the Glasgow Sculpture Workshop, and the St Magnus Festival in Orkney.

This move is consistent with a trend that has become very familiar to us in the South-West over the last couple of years ie a move away from core support and towards project-based funding. This direction is pushing arts organisations to see themselves as (the increasingly familiar phrase) 'Social Enterprises' - which basically means having a mixture of commercial and funded 'income streams'

And the reason that this all sounds so familiar and the D+G might just be ahead of the curve right now....there are NO Flexibly Funded organisations or events south of Lanark. dgArts was the last such organisation in the South and CS withdrew their funding 18 months ago.

All the work that has been done in the sector over the last year to re-imagine the way that we work together with each other, with the Cooncil, with CS and other agencies has been conducted within this new climate of how the arts are funded....hopefully all that hard work will pay off - there is absolutely no reason why we shouldn't stay out in front and show the rest of the country what we can do now

All together now...with Dumfries' favourite living cultural export

posted by MB