Free money for artists | Natasha Caruana
We are in a pandemic and many of us - including myself - have had hundreds of thousands of pounds of work cancelled. As of Saturday 23 May 2020, there does not seem to be an end in sight for the cultural sector. At Work-Show-Grow we have had to think on our feet and embrace new digital ways to bring people together. We have been offering a range of online activities to educate, entertain and keep our little corner of the internet connected. During Week 2 we had a lot of requests to take our courses online. We carefully did this by releasing the Creative Research and Connecting - Making authentic connections for your work workshops.
Prior to lock down we were hosting intimate Money workshops in our studio, they had a long waiting list due to the no-nonsense and practical approach in explaining how artists can successfully receive grant money. Due to Covid-19 the Arts Council England (the main public funding organisation in the UK) re-prioritised itself to offer emergency grants to organisations and freelancers. A number of our Money workshop participants had to quickly reorganise and rewrite their applications to fit the new criteria, we are very happy to share that every applicant that went on the Money course prior to lockdown was successful in their application. Incredible! Our 100% success rate continues.
This goes to show that exercising the discipline of writing about your work and its objectives is never wasted.
There is an overwhelming amount of free money out there at the moment and we are passionate to see that our WSG creatives get a chunk of it. This is why we are going to take our Money workshop online again, but this time make the teaching material international so our growing global community can benefit.
WORK-SHOW-GROW MONEY WORKSHOP ATTENDEE, JANUARY 2020
The Money workshop teaches writing for grants and awards with an international persepctive. It covers budgeting and grant-management whilst unpacking the artistic money mind-set. Amongst many other insights you will learn that:
1. At whatever stage you are in your career receiving free public/state funding is a formula that can be taught and learnt - fact!
2. Your art practice deserves free public/state funding, the writing in your application should reflect this confidence.
3. Learning to write about your work, in your own voice, increases your chances of receiving free/public state funding. Mastering this also means you have a concise and confident statement about your work that you can use for other areas of your practice, be it text for your website, introductory statement for a curator or adapted for social media.
We are so excited to bring back the Money for Artist’s Workshop for June 2020. It will be launching on Thursday 28th May 2020.
WORK-SHOW-GROW MONEY WORKSHOP ATTENDEE, FEBRUARY 2020