Reflections on Funding & Partnership

EU budget – forecasting and design

Partnership and Funding In an EU project there are always two parts to the budget and financing: the total budget of the project and the part of the budget reportable to the EU – the “eligible expenditure.” In many projects they are the same thing. But it is often the case that what the coordinator [Read more...]

EU grant spent on artistic creation and artists

As a general principle we decided that the majority of the EU grant should be spent on artistic creation and on artists. Each coorganiser proposed artists to take part in the project and an early meeting took place in Constanta, Romania in September 2006 (before the EU application was made) to introduce the artists to [Read more...]

Fund raising and a flexible budget

Raising own investment The Intercult and the coorganisers then set about raising their own investment. The budget was designed to make it possible for the partners to report a part of their usual running costs (salaries and overheads) that are usually covered by their structural or regular funding. The costs of the presentations in each [Read more...]

Working with municipalities and city authorities

In each hosting venue it was also vital to have the support (financial and in-kind) of the local politicians and cultural budgets. This was a double-edged sword. On one hand municipalities were ready to help and had the resources to do so, and many were excellent. On the other hand sometimes their assistance tied the [Read more...]

Partnering with independent organisations and arts activists

The partner groups who we found made the most of the SEAS opportunities were usually the younger, more activist-orientated artists, students and independent event-makers who leapt at the chance to communicate with professional artists from other countries and participate as volunteers and helpers in the project. Examples of strong and satisfying partnerships include the Exit [Read more...]

Co-curation

In programming a SEAS event the project employed a principle of co-curation between the host/coorganiser and Intercult as the executive producer. This principle was built into the structure of the partnership and the budget. The fees of the international artists commissioned by the project were covered by EU money so that that the hosts could [Read more...]

Three types of cultural/business contexts

In an international project, the potential for intercultural misunderstanding is considerable. In the case of SEAS our coorganisers and associate partners worked in broadly three types of cultural/business context: the Scandinavian, the British and the Eastern European. At the risk of being stereotypical, although this is more a prototypical comment, the three contexts could be [Read more...]

A mixed group of coorganisers

Most of the coorganisers played several different roles in the project concurrently: individually they could be the co-producer of an artistic work and host of a SEAS event, act as the curator of a programme of local artists, provide local PR and marketing activities and be the host of a CityScape Conference. Notably different was [Read more...]