Hi Anahata,

I'm not sure how much of the actual agreement between EFDSS and the Arts Council is still confidential, so I'll try to respond in fairly general terms.

The money is, not to put too fine a point on it, to help EFDSS to become a much more strategically important organisation in terms of folk arts development. So it isn't for project work as such, but much more about developing areas of work. For instance, one of the priorities is to develop a much stronger regional strategy. But the uses for the money are stated much more as themes, rather than being for project-specific work.

I also don't think that it's any secret that Folk Arts England decided last year, after a long and successful partnership with the Arts Council, that it no longer wished to be an Arts Council Regularly Funded Organisation, and that the administration there preferred in future to focus on Mrs Casey Music and its associated projects.

There then came a question of what the Arts Council would do with the money previously allocated to Folk Arts England, and a number of consultations took place around the country. The Arts Council seems to have felt that it would still like to see the money going to one strategic organisation, rather than splitting it up into lots of little chunks. But the various consultations undertaken by the Arts Council have been vital, because they have definitely informed the focus and the strategy for how the money will be used. The new EFDSS priorities are quite different from those of Folk Arts England.

I should add that Steve Heap has been incredibly supportive of EFDSS in all of this, and EFDSS might not have got to this stage if not for his advocacy.


Please note that I am speaking about all of this as an individual, and not as a representative of EFDSS. :)