PSA: THE BIGGER PICTURE
CULTURE RECOVERY FUND PSA General Manager, Andy Lenthall delves into the murky world of funding and grant distribution...
Rejection; it’s a hard thing to take. It’s also a hard thing to deliver too; we like to say ‘yes’, we hate saying ‘no’, ‘probably’ isn’t too much help and a ‘thank you’ goes a long way. One of our friends from a grant-giving organisation (not the Arts Council) was helping us with some advice on designing application processes. It turns out that we’d done a good job, but then he raised the small matter of how to write to unsuccessful applicants – something we hadn’t really considered. We like to say ‘yes’ so much that we hadn’t considered the best way to say ‘no’. For every successful Culture Recovery Fund applicant (CRF), there seems to be someone who didn’t get a grant – a statistic evidenced by our survey of applicants. We suspect the data will settle at 52%/48% in favour of success – such a divisive majority. With very little detail given to those that didn’t succeed in their application, the temptation is to simply compare one company to another; one got a grant, one didn’t – similar
companies, competitors that are now sharing an uneven playing field. Could the same not be said for those that applied for, say, a CBILS loan, a bounceback loan or other support? Nothing is given because someone else got it; it’s based on applications matching predetermined criteria. To make a sound judgement on how fair the Culture Recovery Fund grant distribution was would require a little more detail about the applications. Decisions were based on applications rather than comparisons between companies. The least people deserve is a wider explanation of common reasons for rejection. One very specific reason for the fund’s existence was to help organisations that, after exhausting all options, were at risk of failure before April 2021. If, for example, you hadn’t applied for CBILS, there would have to be a very good reason. If you had and had been turned down, there was a reason to apply. Other measures might include redundancies. The grants 58
