Creative New Zealand ditches arts grants
Thursday, 16 November 2023
National arts funding agency Creative NZ has ditched its oversubscribed contestable arts grants that artists had come to resent.
The agency will replace the grants from March with eight new funds, which, separately, will be ringfenced for early career artists, arts organisations and groups, and other practitioners.
At present, arts grants are contested by all artists and groups.
Applicants had increasingly been frustrated with the agency after demand - and therefore competition - for funding skyrocketed in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic.
The new funds are the result of a wide-ranging review of Creative NZ’s services, which the agency embarked on in December last year amid the growing deluge of funding applications, a plummeting satisfaction rate, and separate PR crises involving the Shakespeare Globe Centre of NZ and small business network We Are Indigo.
Gretchen La Roche, the agency’s senior manager of arts development services, said it heard artists’ calls for fundamental change.
The agency was moving from a one-size-fits-all approach to accessible, focused and fairer support.
“We’ve moved from a focus on investing in projects to investing in people. These changes have been made to support artists to be able to take more risks. We want to provide greater flexibility for artists who we know need different things at different times,” La Roche said in a statement.
Creative NZ would put emphasis on valuing artists’ time, longer-term artist development and building relationships with artists outside its funding schemes.
Stephen Wainwright, Creative NZ’s chief executive, said the agency was intentionally becoming more artist-centred. It was trying to simplify its support systems.
The new funds won’t affect Creative NZ’s longer-term investment programmes.
According to papers released to The Post by the Ministry for Culture and Heritage, demand for funding from the agency remained very high.
Creative NZ would change how it engaged with applicants, and how it communicated with the arts sector, according to the papers.
There were doubts the new funds would do more for artists. Steve Lowndes, former chairperson of Arts On Tour NZ, said: “Rearranging the deck chairs always gives the impression of doing something but the real issue is adequate funding for the arts overall.”
Most of Creative NZ’s funding comes from the NZ Lotteries Grant Board.
Over the past month Creative NZ warned it would be operating from next year with $49.5 million from the board - about $5m less than it was given last year. But that figure could be even lower if lottery profits were lower than forecast.
Its new funds were designed with this in mind, Creative NZ said on Wednesday.
Two weeks ago Wainwright announced he would leave the agency mid-next year.
Earlier this year he was censured over his lack of leadership during a flooding incident at Auckland Airport in January.
Creative NZ leaders acted in a hierarchical way and were focused on their own needs at the airport by checking into the Koru Club while other staff felt abandoned, uncared for and unsupported, an independent review found.
Critics had called for a changing of the guard at the agency’s highest ranks.
The agency spends $12,210 a year on 29 Koru Club memberships for staff who travel frequently, according to newly released papers.
The cost of the Auckland trip totalled $75,815, including $27,345 on flights.