CEO Update: March 2022
Regional Arts WA
In our first update of 2022 CEO Paul MacPhail updates us on the current impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, grant opportunities, federal election advocacy, Chamber survey results and our upcoming Annual General Meeting (AGM).
Transcript
Kaya Noonacoort and welcome to my first message of 2022.
What a hell of a year it feels as though it’s been already. With the pandemic now really have a significant impact in regional WA, I hope you’re all looking after yourselves and that you’re managing to negotiate your way through the ever-changing environment and restrictions that we have in place.
I know that some of you have been struggling with cancellations to events and program reductions and I just wanted to let you know that we’re fully in support of all of these decisions that you’re making, and hopefully you can turn to us to ask any questions and get some advice on what’s going on.
We are trying to keep our resources page up to date with all the latest information on the government directions and restrictions, so make sure you use that as a first point of contact and hopefully we’ve been able to provide a little bit of relief here and there with some of the funding programs that we’ve either just announced or are about to announce – The Cultural Tourism Accelerator Program and the Regional Arts Project Fund – so that hopefully we can all continue to deliver fantastic results for our communities over the next six months as we learn to live with this pandemic.
We’ve got a federal election coming up fairly soon and we’ve been working with our national colleagues to put together some messaging so we hope that there’s a standardised arts voice right across the national arts sector when we’re advocating to both parties in this upcoming election.
The two key messages are: Art and Culture are everywhere, and Art and Culture are Essential. We will be sharing these with you soon, and some initiations for you to take them up and use them and speak to your local members and make sure the voice that we have is a truly national one. I hope you’ll join us in that endeavor.
Speaking of elections, we’ve got our own AGM coming up in the first week of May. So if you are one of our members please keep an eye out on the papers for that.
Lastly, we’ve been helping out our friends at the Chamber of Arts and Culture who have been running a statewide survey looking mostly at the financial health of arts organisations and artists, and trying to work out where we can identify gaps and how we can help. So, we’ve been helping them out by making sure that it gets as much of a regional reach as possible.
They’ve very kindly agreed to share the results and the data from that survey with us. So we will be analysing those over the next couple of months and then be coming back to you about where we can most offer assistance and help.
In the meantime, please keep an eye on our website for opportunities for funding and the resource links that we have there, and I look forward to catching up with you very soon.
