Maroc - NEWSDAY.CO.TT - A la Une - Hier 08:28

Funding the arts in Trinidad and Tobago

LAST Sunday’s Newsday editorial addressed the national sense of alarm over the National Gas Company’s (NGC) defunding thriving steel orchestras located in their “fenceline” communities. It followed on the national embarrassment of Barbados – a country with a GDP one-fifth the size of TT’s – buying the culturally valuable Banyan archive after NGC failed to secure it. In fact, the Bocas Lit Fest, TT’s annual literary festival that is regarded as among the Top 20 in the world, suffered a similar fate to the steelbands. In 2024, NGC funded the literary festival only partially, and not at all in 2025. So far, the 2026 festival has only one partial sponsor confirmed and is actively seeking more sponsors. The NGO has launched a donations drive on its website www.bocaslitfest.com Trinis boast about our tremendous talent, but talk is cheap. We do not know how to cherish, nurture, or preserve that talent, nor have we sought to align cultural development with national priorities in any serious way. All areas of the arts and cultural expression have suffered greatly as a result. The Carnival arts are a particularly striking example: our prime national festival’s clear commercial value has led to its foundational art forms being overdeveloped strictly for profit and to drive tourism. The steelpan is loved, but not sufficiently supported financially and structurally, and only lip service is paid to the rest. NGC’s decision to concentrate on sport funding underlines a much bigger issue with regard to TT’s culture and the value we place on it. The question is if not NGC, then who will support the arts? Most arts funding comes from the private sector. The National Lotteries Control Board (NLCB), the state entity with a mandate to fund arts and culture, has no overarching arts policy. One needs a sorcerer’s skills to obtain funding and if you did, your grant would bear little relation to the size of your project. The NLCB just shares the pie equally. Carnival and pan gobble up most of the state’s official culture funding, and smaller initiatives must avail themselves of the comparatively small grants offered by any iteration of a ministry of culture. Bocas Lit Fest, which had over 70,000 patrons to date, receives government support only to the value of three percent of its annual operating costs and although the 2025 festival took place in April, that funding remains outstanding. We cannot grow a successful arts sector in such a way. It is neither stable nor sustainable. An arts organisation in TT is only as successful or viable as the underpaid person in charge is capable of procuring funding by attracting and retaining sponsors and delivering a first class production while engaged in good governance. It is why the arts continue to struggle. A further, particular challenge for the literary arts is the unreasonable full VAT payable on non-academic books, which Customs and Excise have great difficulty in defining, making their levies arbitrary. The present government will, hopefully, see the nonsense of penalising people who read and write books and remove the tax. It is time for the state and the private sector, together, to establish a national arts policy and a funding agency that will not be a political football and is properly constituted with strict funding rules to avoid nepotism and other forms of corruption. It should have an index-linked annual budget and an arts policy that seeks to build our culture in accordance with a set of national priorities. It is not rocket science; other countries do it. An Arts Council, created by an Act of Parliament, would not prevent the private sector from funding other cultural projects, but it would allow companies to receive generous tax breaks for their contributions to the Arts Council that would support the core of the nation’s art sector. Without NGC, TT’s now world-famous annual literary festival would have been stillborn. From 2012-2023 NGC was title sponsor. Known as the NGC Bocas Lit Fest, it caused a seismic shift in the world of Caribbean literature as well as for NGC, which garnered vast amounts of goodwill and additional promotion of its brand and logo at home and abroad. Guaranteed NGC funding allowed the NGO to plan, develop, nurture talent, and promote the festival internationally, leading to a host of new prize-winning writers emerging and exerting their influence in the global arena of ideas both at home and in the diaspora. The 2025 festival was done on a shoestring, pulling in favours mainly from foreign programming partners and with the in-kind support of many smaller local sponsors. If the various funding proposals now sitting with the marketing departments of various companies fail to appeal to the decision-makers the scale and format of the 2026 festival may have to change. It is hoped an appreciative public and writing fraternity will contribute generously to the donations drive. Marina Salandy-Brown is the founder and president of the Bocas Lit Fest. The post Funding the arts in Trinidad and Tobago appeared first on Trinidad and Tobago Newsday.