Ministry for Culture and Heritage

Yeah.

We were lucky enough in kind of the COVID times to be given quite a large grant through the Ministry of Culture and Heritage, $100,000 a year for three years.

And that was offered to creative spaces across the country so that they could kind of grow and adapt for that really difficult time.

which was amazing so we were able to grow we have a new building with really great street frontage we've been able to increase our services and then that money stopped yeah funding to replace that has just been so hard so you've got this growth which is incredible but now across the whole country you've got these creative spaces which have grown but don't have the kind of backing to sustain that growth which is yeah it's really hard

Yeah, we'd done some research in the Waikato region around the impact of arts, culture, and creativity on communities and had also kind of got some insights into what, uh, artists needed.

And then when Manatū Taonga, the Ministry for Culture and Heritage, ran their Te Ururangi, um, Innovation Fund in 2022, we thought this was the opportunity to, um, put forward the idea for something around social innovation.

So rather than sort of developing tech or anything, it's looking at how we could explore new models of patronage for artists and creative practitioners who were delivering work in the communities of the Waikato.

Was that Irish program on your radar?