Dr. ISMAIL MAHOMED CULTURAL CORNER: Thoughts and Experiences - Understanding and navigating the funding landscape.

Day 17 of 100 of the Siphindile Nuh Chelsea Hlongwa Challenge that I should write down my thought and experiences about how I survived holding key cultural leadership positions over the past four decades. In my post today I write about understanding and navigating the funding landscape. 

Portrait Illustration of Dr. Ismail Mahomed. Photo Credit: Facebook 

In 1996, when I moved from freelancing to working in formally structured arts organisations one of the fastest things that I learnt is how to tap on different sources of funding that can make up the total income for an arts company. 

Each kind of funding whether it is subsidies, grants, corporate sponsorship, self-generated funding or international donor funding has its own rules, regulatory & accounting systems, reporting systems and risks. The sooner I learnt about this the easier it became to tap into different sources for funding. 

At a workshop hosted by Drama for Life at Wits University yesterday I spoke to students about these different kinds of funding. I also touched on how public philanthropy, the loyalty or subscription ticket and in-kind contributions can also be significant ways to support an arts programme. I delved into why understanding an embassy’s public diplomacy agenda was essential to understanding how to tap into the international funding that can be sourced via the cultural attaché offices of the embassies. I touched on why letting go off a funder should also be an act of courage to innovate, re-envision and affirm an organisation’s values, programming and relationship with an organisation’s constituency rather than being a threat to sustainability. 

For the past two consecutive years at the University of KwaZulu-Natal my colleague Siphindile Hlongwa and I received awards for our fundraising for the Centre for Creative Arts. Since joining the Centre in 2020, we have been able to increase our fundraising targets each year, diversify our funding and also obtain clean audits for how we manage, administrate and report on our funding. 

We are both aware of how arts managers / arts organisers often times burn out from stressing about funding. It needn’t be a stress. It requires managers to invest in spending some time to learn about the funding landscape and how to navigate it. It also requires arts organisations to recognise how the power of broadening partnerships with other organisations / artists can broaden the opportunities that exist to secure funding. 

Funding brokering is both an art and a science. How it is sourced and spent is an art. How it is accounted for and reported on to the funder is a science. Learning to straddle between the art and the sciences of fundraising is essential for building sustainability. 

Dr Ismail Mahomed is the Director for the Centre for Creative Arts at the University of KwaZulu-Natal. He is a multi-award winning and multi-published arts management strategist and playwright with more than 35 years’ experience in cultural leadership positions.