Arts and culture took centre stage as provincial leaders and senior stakeholders descended on Gqeberha on Thursday for the two-day National Arts and Culture Council Sector Conference.
The council, in collaboration with the Eastern Cape Provincial Arts & Culture Council, held the engagement with nine provincial arts and culture councils, the government, development finance and private sector partners in an effort to strengthen co-ordination across SA’s arts and culture funding.
The theme for the conference, taking place at the Garden Court Kings Beach, is “Strengthening Sector Co-ordination and Alignment”.
On the first day of the event, National Arts Council of SA provincial committee chair Dr Zolani Mkiva called for greater collaboration between the NAC and the country’s nine provincial arts councils to strengthen the arts sector and ensure resources reached artists on the ground.
The NAC is mandated to promote and develop the arts in SA through the provision of funding and support for arts sector development initiatives.
Provincial arts and culture councils (PACCs) play a complementary role by supporting and advancing arts and cultural development within their respective provincial contexts.
Multi-award-winning SA poet and cultural ambassador Mkiva said the NAC needed to institutionalise its relationship with provincial arts councils through a structured framework for co-ordination, decision-making and implementation.
“The NAC is a national body and only has an office at national level.
"It does not find expression in provinces and does not have a footprint in provinces, but it has to find expression on the ground.
“This must translate to a memorandum of agreement between the NAC and all the nine provincial arts councils so that we consolidate our solidarity and our efforts in the best interest of the arts fraternity as well as for the benefit of the artists on the ground,” Mkiva said.
Among those in the attendance was former Makhanda National Arts Festival chief executive Monica Newton, who is now the National Lotteries Commission executive manager for grant funding.
According to Newton’s presentation, there were fewer organisations from the Eastern Cape applying for funding.
She said one of the challenges was that arts organisations needed to ensure they were “grant ready” before applying.
She said this meant having all the necessary compliance documentation, policies and governance structures in place, while being able to clearly articulate the organisation’s purpose, the project it wanted to undertake and why it required additional resources.
“The funding process is long, it is quite arduous, and at the end of the day, it is also really competitive, so you have to be able to phrase what you are wanting to do really, really well.
“But probably the biggest message that I would send is you have to make sure that you are grant ready to really be up for what might be one of the most complex and governance-oriented grants in the history of your organisation.
“Please do not let AI write your proposal.
"It can help you write your proposal, but if you write a prompt like ‘National Lottery Commission’ and please make it good, I can almost guarantee you it is going to fail,” Newton said.
She stressed that organisations needed to strengthen their ability to manage grants by ensuring that monitoring, reporting, governance and other basic corporate requirements were in place.
“One of the biggest challenges that we have in the Eastern Cape is compliant organisations, so it is really about making sure that we work with Eastern Cape arts organisations and, of course, incredible structures like the Eastern Cape Provincial Arts & Culture Council, the Mandela Bay Theatre Complex and other really fantastic cultural institutions here in the province."
