It’s that time of year. Funding applications. Music Bursary Awards, Artist in the Community Awards, Artist in Residence Awards….there’s certainly no shortage of Arts funding in this country, it just takes a very particular type of personality to sit down and craft a successful application – and no matter how many times I do it I’m always taken aback by how time consuming the process is. Sometimes it feels it wouldn’t be worth the time that goes into each application even if you were guaranteed you’d get the funding, let alone in the almost certain knowledge that you won’t.
But a happy side-effect can be that it can give some focus to your ideas – nothing like having to describe a project on paper for making you think about what you’d actually like to accomplish! And funding opportunities can steer you in directions you may not otherwise have thought of; last year I applied for and got funding to participate in a project called Connecting through Creativity without really knowing what it was, and was initially somewhat dismayed to discover that the emphasis was on Visual Arts. But there can be something liberating about participating in an arts discipline other than your own, and it allowed me to learn a lot about creative processes, possibly more than I might have had the project been built around a music framework. Plus it was fun to hang out with visual artists for a bit….spending too much time with musicians is probably not good for one’s health.
Advice to anyone else currently working on funding applications: however long you think it will take, add a day.
cathymcevoy 