Thank you for your input on EAC’s first set of survey questions. You were forthcoming and shared a lot of important wisdom with us. About 100 people shared their thoughts with us, which is a great start. But we are always hoping for as many voices as possible – tell your fellow organizations about these surveys. The more the merrier.
Here are the major themes of what you told us in the first survey:
- Largely, you agreed with the direction of the principles, but you wanted them to be simpler and you wanted them to reflect that the growth of the whole arts ecosystem was the priority, and be careful about making them too EAC-centric.
- You cautioned us about creating a granting structure that stunts an organization if it succeeds or grows – you wanted the granting system to be flexible enough to take the changing circumstances of an organization into account.
- You wanted us to be more specific about the different types of organization in the granting cohorts.
- You wanted more clarity on what Connections & Exchanges is intended to do.
- Our multi-year and operating grants needed to take into account the diversity of the different organizations.
- You had a lot of ideas for other potential granting programs, including:
- Grants to encourage collaboration
- Arts education and outreach
- Creating more project grants, like the recent Connections & Exchanges grant
- Critical discourse grants
- Providing more seed-funding for organizations
- Grants that allow organizations to more inclusive
- You wanted to be able to provide some quantitative feedback on these surveys, not just open ended answers.
With all of this feedback, we have created a new set of questions we would like your input to help us move forward in the development of our revised granting program. We’ll give you about two weeks to provide input to on the next survey. Remember, we will have more surveys after this one and over the next few months, so we may not cover everything in this one. It’s certainly not designed to be as comprehensive as the previous survey.
ALSO VERY IMPORTANT: We want to start talking to you in person about these questions. If you would like to do an interview or be part of a roundtable on these issues, email feedback@edmontonarts.ca and we will set something up.
Thank you for your participation!
