Australian State Arts Minister Under Fire For Secretly Redirecting Funds

“[New South Wales] Minister for the Arts, Don Harwin, rejected independent recommendations to distribute $660,000 across 17 projects in a recent Create NSW funding round. [Create NSW is the state’s arts funding body.] Harwin instead signed off on funding for only six of the 16 applications, reallocating $404,000 towards a single project, which the ABC identified as the Sydney Symphony Orchestra.”

Targets and Timeframes

To be sustainable, community engagement must benefit the arts organization in tangible ways. To be supported institutionally, the path to ticket sales, funding, and public policy must be articulated and tracked. A principal difficulty in this is that in order to accomplish these gains we must do work in marketing, funding, and advocacy that we’ve almost never done before.