Sheena Boughen tells the Four Winds story

Sheena Boughen, Chair of the Four Winds Festival

On Friday 16 March Museums & Galleries NSW, in partnership with South East Arts, hosted Show me the Money: Access to Funding – a full day workshop about writing winning grant applications with representatives from a range of key funding and support bodies.

The keynote speaker was Sheena Boughen, Chair of the Four Winds Festival in Bermagui. The Four Winds Festival has recently completed building a permanent festival site and the story of how they raised the commitment and dollars is truly inspirational.

Sheena believes passionately that participation as a audience member or artist of music of the highest quality is a powerful and essential ingredient of a civilised life. In the following audio clips, Sheena talks about funding indirectly and instead concentrates on the importance of purpose, ambition, partnerships and recognising a winning story in securing funding from multiple sources.

Sheena's Introduction
  Sheena discusses ambition and defining purpose
  Nature's Concert Hall Then and Now

The original Four Winds performance space

Four Winds and Bermagui are cultural tourist sites

The ongoing issues with the Four Winds site

The new designed sound shell and accompanying structures.

  How did Four Winds Festival achieve their vision?
  The 3 Ps of success - purpose, partnerships and people
  Sheena talks about pitching the winning story

Members of The Four Winds Festival team

 

Accessing funding in Batemans Bay

Show me the Money - Access to Funding is a workshop we put on every year in a different part of NSW. Previous Standards participants, local museums, galleries and community arts groups are given the opportunity to hear from a range of funding providers and even chat with them about potential projects for funding. 

Andrew, Cassie and I had a beautiful drive down the coast to Batemans Bay the day before the workshop, and also managed to have a good look around the Old Courthouse Museum. The museum successfuly completed the Standards Program last year and have a range of projects on the go. Our visit coincided with the opening of their new room built especially for their volunteers. 

We also had to be dragged away from Bozo the resident dog who was most disarming. 

Delegates chat with Dianne Dahlitz about the Community Heritage Grant program.

We had a great line up of speakers at the workshop – Dianne Dahlitz who manages the Community Heritage Grants from the National Library; Einar Docker from the Powerhouse Museum’s regional services; Grainne Brundson from Arts NSW, Andrew Gray from South East Arts who represented Regional Arts NSW; and Bea Brickhill from AbaF who spoke about how arts organisations can build relationships with businesses.

One of the highlights of the day was Sheena Boughden’s inspirational keynote talk on the development of the Four Winds Festival – a music festival held every second Easter in Bermagui that Sheena and her team have built up to be a hugely successful enterprise.

The Clyde River and Batemans Bay Historical Society put on some of the best catering we have ever seen, and understandably received a spontaneous round of applause from the delegates!

Thanks to our partner South East Arts and Andrew Gray, all our amazing speakers and the team at the Old Courthouse Museum.

M&G NSW has some helpful resources on grant writing and project management. And don't forget our excellent resource the 2012 Grants and Funding Guide!

Next week we should have several of the talks available through our website and Alert!