Art Grant Accountability/Transparency

What degree of accountability and transparency can we expect from the Art Grants team on their decision making. Money is tight it seems, and plenty of people might be getting disappointing news today.

I would like Nest to be fully transparent about which projects were funded to what degree and to what amount, and which were rejected, with clear reasoning for all, and that information available to all.

Perhaps that is done every year anyway, in which case, ignore this - but I haven't noticed it before.

I think this is a very sensible idea

AFAIK it's released every year. Lexy certainly released this information last year - in as much as all applications received grants. This year might be different as there have been a lot of applications.

I don't believe money is tight and i think it's moderately nefarious to suggest so. We are on the verge of selling all memberships, so there wont be a dearth of monies.

That's interesting because not all applications received grants. I know that because I was one, even though I now see we had £900 left in the end.
What's the process here if people are declined, they do it anyway and we end up in a similar position with art grant money unclaimed again?

I think I was one of the culprits with about £250 unclaimed from arts grants in the end. Post-event I just didn’t have the receipts I needed to claim and so didn’t end up doing it...

Presumably the money left over which is unclaimed would just go into the budget for the following year to fund more awesome art next time around??

"Money is tight" is true in the sense that there are not enough art grant funds to fund all the applications. A lot had to be rejected this cycle. And both last year and this year a lot of grants, especially in cycle 2, were far below what people asked for or what we would have liked to fund.
We did not give funding to every single application last year - I think our Finance Lead got this impression because we did receive some extra funding near the end which allowed us to fund some people who had not received any funding yet.

yes any money left over goes into the next year

Just to clarify, when the information was released about "all art grants have been funded" this was not at the end of the cycles, but at the time of particular community meeting and in context of discussing art grants at that time.

That said, I wasn't aware that there were later applications declined so apologise if I may have given misinformation on that point.

As Amanda as said, there was additional budget assigned to Art Grants once we realised we had higher budget than expected initially due to higher ticket sales. Our initial budget was based on 450 ticket sales, however we sold nearer 500 tickets for the event so various teams were given more budget at this time.

Ahh ok. thanks amanda for clarification. We released a comms about this so that's where i'm getting my info from.