curious patterns #1
On the economics of grant-writing, a mobile app using audiovisual heritage for peace education, why an ambassador walks over people, and more.
Welcome to this very first edition of curious patterns. I’m glad you have signed up and join me on this experiment of a monthly email newsletter on all things culture, impact and development. My main intention is to share with you practical, fascinating and informative content while jumping back and forth between practice, policy and research. I have no agenda other than to create a useful resource for our community working in this field. I invite you to comment, discuss and share, and I am super keen to hear what you think and what I should be covering in the future: kai@edgeandstory.com
Now, let’s get started:
💰 The flawed economics of grant-writing
For many grassroots actors in culture and development, grants are one of the main funding sources and writing grant applications is a key component of daily office work. The more fundamental question of whether grants are still as impactful a funding instrument as, for example, direct and unrestricted cash disbursements aside, do grants make sense economically?
Let’s take a fictional foundation, disbursing a total of $500,000 in grants of $25,000. That would translate into 20 successful applicants. Now, 25k are a substantial amount of money for a small organisation and the prospect of 20 applicants being selected make the likelihood of receiving a grant appear not too small, either. So, you decide to go for it. Let’s be generous and say your full-time grant-writing staff spends 4 working days on the perfect application, that’s roughly a 0.2 FTE. If you pay for your employee including overheads and taxes $1,500 per month, that would translate into expenses of $300 per application. If the grant had a 10% success rate, 200 applications were received by the funder. And when 200 organisations spend on average $300 on the application, you end up with total costs of $60,000. Deducting the $6,000 that the successful organisations spend on their applications leaves the unsuccessful organisations with an overall loss of $54,000.
Yes, several organisations have received a large chunk of money, but even more organisations collectively lost about 11% of the overall grant value offered, with no responsibility taken by the funder. And this simple calculation does not even take into account any power imbalances among applicants, which - let’s be honest - are very likely at play. I wonder, should this be considered a $446,000 win or a $54,000 loss for the sector? And what can be done to mitigate this - reimbursements for unsuccessful applicants, brief letters of intent instead of full applications in the first instance, application by invitation only, direct giving, grant-writing collectives?
📰 What’s new
🇰🇮 Chinese Ambassador to Kiribati walked over several people, international outrage followed, and Dr Katerina Teaiwa reminds us about cultural diversity.
While Belarus is closing its borders to the West and deploys more and more military, Belarus Free Theatre, the cultural sector and women fight on.
🇳🇬 Ordering an evaluation of the impact of COVID-19 on Nigeria’s CCIs, its Arts Council made it pretty clear that culture should be treated as an economic driver.
🇿🇼 In Zimbabwe, the arts sector stands accused of working too little with the government to survive. Independent creatives take matters into their own hands.
🇱🇧 While Beirut’s museums receive international first aid and UNESCO started a crowdfunding campaign, creatives are divided between rebuilding and leaving.
🇰🇪 Kenyan music streaming start-up Mdundo listed at Danish stock exchange. There is massive potential for the Sub-Saharan market in legal music access.
🇮🇩 documenta 15 curatorial collective ruangrupa has invited nine other organisations to join a different kind of collaborative model of resource use.
🔍 A Closer Look
LO👏 CAL👏 I👏 SA👏 TION👏
Cultural Industries and Foreign Cultural and Educational Policy (AKBP) in Sub-Saharan Africa
(2020: Pedro Affonso Ivo Franco, Kimani Njogu)
First of all, kudos to ifa for getting the right people on the job. Pedro Affonso Ivo Franco and Dr Kimani Njogu did a great job highlighting some of the most pressing issues that European actors working through the lens of culture and development in Africa should take to heart. First, they provided a very brief yet informative breakdown of the different regions, their CCIs and corresponding policy frameworks. An overview of what and how the EU and its member states currently support culture in Sub-Saharan Africa and a generous set of recommendations follow.
I am only pulling out a few points here. I read about the need for policy coherence among international actors operating in the same space, a plea for foreign entities to put African languages first, and the need for grant applications to be democratised as they are way too complex. I fully agree - EU frameworks are the worst, alongside Oxfam and perhaps Japan Foundation. Sadly outside the scope of the research, I would have loved to read more about the Chinese implicit cultural foreign policy in Africa that was briefly addressed.
It’s an eye-opening selection of case studies distilled into a set of recommendations that hopefully decision makers in the relevant ministries and commissions actually read. The biggest flaw of this research project then is that its commissioners were probably defining the scope too narrowly. This was partly addressed in an online discussion, where topics beyond EU influence were brought up.
Pedro and Kimani reiterated that - no surprise here - EU cultural programmes need to embrace localisation and ideally have its programs conceptualised as fully locally owned by its very design. A sentiment which Joy Mboya from Nairobi’s GoDown Arts Centre strongly echoed: Make an effort to understand the sector’s inner life and then align your strategy. The future needs to see localisation in every way possible, including funding sources, philanthropy, cultural institutions, infrastructure, content narratives and consumption. Other points made by the study authors included the need for more flexible grants, especially the opportunity to sub-grant, capacity development around intellectual property rights and funding focus on environmental sustainability.
The African Development Bank for the most part recited their own activities without really addressing the issue at heart, the African Union presented a handful of policy activities, the German Ministry of Foreign Affairs did not offer much beyond good intentions while the European Commission representative at least offered some hints at potentially useful attempts at localisation and co-production funds. Kimani and Pedro strongly suggested that any funders wanting to support any kind of collaboration projects need to invest time and resources into introducing the sectors to each other first and perhaps even assume the role of matchmaker. So, the ideal role of EU culture in Sub-Saharan Africa should be that of a facilitator, not a meddler - what do you think?
🦄 Unicorns
One app to teach them all
Cambodia has an incredibly young population, a mobile phone penetration of 120%, fairly affordable data and a pretty dismal record when it comes to teaching its own country’s more recent history in schools (other than the one heavily politicised official narrative). Perfect conditions for a GLAM organisation to jump in with a great innovation that proves their relevance in the digital space - even before Covid.
Phnom Penh’s Bophana Audiovisual Resource Centre used their archive of videos, photos and audio recordings to put together a history learning app for Cambodian high school students. It’s available for both Android and Apple users, has a scientific committee approving the content and brilliantly highlights the vast richness of its archive that everyone can visit and browse for free when in town. This is a brilliant use of technology to hero audiovisual heritage whilst delivering much-needed balanced genocide education. Read more about this project here.
Forces of Art: re-thinking the value of arts around the world
On November 26, the book Forces of Art will be published. This promises to be an exciting day as the website of this really rather unique research project on cultural organisations and projects around the world already looks brilliant. There is a good mix of organisations that have already received their fair share of publicity and lesser known ones, all bundled together in thematic chapters about commons, resilience, inclusion, digital transitions and many more. I am most excited about Chapter 7, “Criticism is a Luxury: On the Effect of Evaluation”:
The research highlights how funding programmes and hence their evaluations are structured by neoliberal performance goals and are therefore counterproductive to any form of solidarity or sustainability.
🔧 Toolbox
The intuitive & collaborative alternative to PowerPoint
Pitch is a young tech startup with one thing in mind: allowing you and your team to work together on a presentation. While the collaborative features are great for decentralised teams or those not being able to access office spaces right now, it really wins in the design and usability department. Think master themes, Unsplash integration and grid logics - a dream to quickly create something beautiful.
As they are still in beta testing phase, Pitch selectively gives out free access. Just click the “Get early access” button in the top menu and sign up. Give it a shot - for me, it is a game changer creating presentations that you can also directly share online.
🎤 Humans
An interview with Nwet Kay Khine
For this first edition of curious patterns, Nwet Kay Khine shares some thoughts about possession and value with us to ponder. Nwet Kay Khine (pen name: Mal Hmway) is a Yangon-based writer who loves to work on both fiction and non-fiction. At present, she is also a post-doc researcher at Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok.
A fascinating concept you were introduced to recently?
Rural revitalization is a concept I find fascinating in the context of Covid-19 pandemic. Until recently, we tended to think rural areas are backward, peripheral and inferior to the urban- being not a place for talents. Covid-19 has shown us how imbalance between the urban and rural development has put everyone in a more vulnerable position. We neglect the value of the rural while they feed and support the city dwellers. From now on, revitalizing the rural is likely to be a new trend restrengthening both physical and social capital of the once marginal land. Now is time to bring the talents back to the rural by generating equal opportunities with advancing technology and creative economy that forbid a unilateral prosperity for the urban class. The cultural community can play a key role in rural revitalization.
An artist with an urgent message?
I heard too often about a famous work of Leo Tolstoy: “How much land does a man need”. But I never had a chance to read it. It is a story of a peasant who strived to become a land owner with endless prosperity and died of exhaustion from his last try for more acres of land. Last week, I had time to read it and at the end of the story, I put a paper stand on my desk showing a two-letter words: “Six feet”. When you see the word, “six feet”, it is easier to have compassion for yourself and the other.
A question worth asking?
How dangerous are we to the mother earth?
🚀 Opportunities
By October 8: Foreign cultural and educational policy in regions of crisis: Case studies of Lebanon and Iraq
It’s an absolute nightmare to find this call for research proposals on ifa’s website. So, here it is. They are looking to identify what interventions might make sense at what stages of conflict, what cultural factors play a significant role in the conflicts in 🇱🇧 and 🇮🇶, and how Germany can be better than France.
By October 16: Rethinking Disaster Risk Management for Cultural Heritage Collections
This blended course (meaning online+on site in Manila) by ICCROM is quite specific for heritage professionals and others in the GLAM space to develop their disaster risk capacity. Scholarships are available for applicants from Asia-Pacific.
October 19: How Culture Works in Practice [Keyword: EVALUATION 🔥🔥🔥]
I’m very excited the Goethe-Institut feels confident enough to start sharing their endeavours in the evaluation field. In 2015, the GI published their own research into evaluation concepts for cultural relations work. This ENCATC webinar promises to be a nice glimpse into the world of evaluation design, indicators and methodologies. Let’s just hope they’re not too German about it…
October 20: La diversidad de las expresiones culturales en América Latina: retos actuales y futuros
At this online conference about current and future challenges for cultural diversity in ‘Latin America’, artists, administrators and academics from many countries, including 🇦🇷 🇨🇱 🇵🇾 🇧🇷 will discuss ways to bounce back from the current crisis and how the 2005 UNESCO Convention can play a role in this process. The IFCCD is hosting.
By October 20: Solidarity Fund for African Artists and Cultural Organizations
The African Culture Fund launches a new relief grant programme for cultural organisations in Africa. Great thing: the fund does not only cover project costs but also operating expenses. Maximum funding is $5,000.
📻 Media
Your new best friend ranting about all the things that are wrong in the nonprofit space is Vu Le of the Nonprofit AF blog. Despite its strong US focus, the debates Vu fires up are relatable and make you nod in agreement way more often than you think you should. Check out this article on toxic intellectualisation.
Rest of World covers tech stories. So far, so good. What makes this platform fascinating is its very deliberate gaze. Stories are about how tech impacts non-Western societies. Quite a few stories look at tech x pop culture and implicit cultural policies.
🐦 Meanwhile on Twitter
curious patterns is a monthly email newsletter on all things culture, impact and development, written by Kai T. Brennert (Twitter | edge & story).
Send a message, share your feedback or reach out with content recommendations for future newsletters - I’d love to hear from you: kai@edgeandstory.com