PROJECT AWARDS

What we call PROJECT funding reaches arts organisations which apply to us at four points through the year on behalf of particular short-term arts projects they are organising.The projects represented here received funding from the Arts Council in the current financial year. This map represents arts events in addition to those indicated on the Revenue map we saw a moment ago. The funding distributed in the four Project rounds is invariably small-scale, and is used by recipients to lever other funding from other bodies, such as their local councils or business sponsorship.

A remarkable feature of many of these Projects is that they were organised by groups which were not primarily arts groups. Working in co-operation with local artists or with professional artists from elsewhere, community groups or social centres or, in some cases, hospitals and residential homes applied to us to help fund projects which may have been their very first excursion into the world of the arts. This is a development we in the Council are keen to encourage, because it meets our twin criteria of Access to and Participation in the arts for as many people as possible.

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For example, in Dungannon, an organisation called UPSTART developed a cross-artform project aimed at women in rural areas. A series of workshops involving visual arts, photography and poetry culminated in an event called WASHDAY, in which a series of clothes lines were strung across the landscape with each garment bearing a humorous, thought-provoking or socially-relevant message.Or again, in Dunamanagh, the community development association applied for a cross-artform project which involved two local history groups and two schools. They ended up mounting an exhibition of cross-community artwork in video and creative writing. Or again, the Belfast Travellers Sites Project applied to produce a book displaying the craft-making traditions of the travelling people, highlighting their own distinctive cultural heritage and how it chimes with the other traditions here with which we are perhaps more familiar.Or again, the Chest, Heart & Stroke association applied to us to support a professionally-facilitated workshop for a group of 17 patients to produce an artwork for a national exhibition. One hundred and thirty-three volunteers worked with the 17 patients.These four projects together added up to a total investment of public funds of less than £5,500. But how would you even begin to measure the return on that investment, the creativity encouraged, the dignity and self-respect enhanced, the sheer inventiveness of the people behind them.

There are a total of 228 other projects such as these which received public funding from the Arts Council in the last year. As you can see, they reach right across the country.