The Kevin Files: funding shell games
Jessica Werb in her excellent piece in the Straight delves into one of the more peculiar aspects related to the cancelation of close to $20 million of Direct Access Funding to arts and culture organizations.
As reported first in PLANK Magazine on August 27th, hundreds of organizations across the province received letters via email last Thursday and Friday informing them that they had been denied their gaming funds. According to Werb – and confirmed by organizations we’ve talked to - some groups then received a follow up letter stating that they will receive BC Arts Council funding through their Gaming account (ironically, it is a stipulation of Gaming that separate accounts are maintained for their funds). According to Werb, on the status web page run by Gaming, these organizations have been listed as recipients of a “Special One Time Grant”, with no reference to the BC Arts Council.
To illustrate how baffling this all is, Werb quotes the following from David Pay:
“Thursday night we got an email from gaming, saying: No money, you’re on your own and here are our priorities,” David Pay, artistic director of Music on Main, told the Straight. “Friday night, we got a letter from Jeremy Long, head of the arts council, emailed...saying that we did receive a grant. And then on Sunday night, [we got] an email again...from gaming, and in the upper right corner it says that it’s regarding our community gaming application. Then inside the letter it says, ‘This is through the B.C. Arts Council. It’s your B.C. Arts Council grant that was awarded.’ So they’re going to deposit it into our gaming account. It does seem just a strange process.” Pay said he had requested $38,000 from gaming, and received $10,000 from the B.C. Arts Council.
Werb also provides details of a conversation the Straight had with a representative from the Ministry of Housing and Social Development, confirming “that the BC Arts Council is giving out money to arts organizations from gaming grant funding”.
Personally, I find the wording of that last statement peculiar. It may seem pedantic but we at PLANK would like to have it specifically spelled out where these “BC Arts Council” funds are being sourced. Is this Gaming funds being given out in the name of BCAC or are they BCAC funds being funnelled through Gaming. And regardless of the original source of the funding – taxpayer or gambler – we would like to know precisely why the Government is behaving in this manner. Has Gaming drafted in BCAC staff to advise them on which arts organizations should be given the crumbs that have been left on the table?
On an even darker note, the representative who spoke to the Straight suggested that Direct Access will be eliminated entirely for arts groups– as we predicted here at PLANK last week. They were quoted as saying the following:
“Moving forward, the dual application process will be eliminated and replaced with one application to the BC Arts Council, to ensure funding priorities are fairly applied and distributed.”
If one could believe that the BCAC was going to be responsible for the distribution of funds derived from Gaming than this could, in the long run, make the process of allocating these funds more accountable. In reality, it seems to be more a case of moving the arts out of the realm of "good causes" and making those funds more vulnerable to the whims of political process.
Of course, in reality, this is a tragedy for arts based organizations who generally received more funding through Gaming than through BCAC.