Celebrating community identity and culture, Penzance

Longer term sustainability

So how is Golowan going to manage to keep going? 'We are fortunate to have premises in a building we wouldn't usually be able to afford. It's provided by a family firm who have historically supported the arts.' says Hall. Short term projects allow Golowan to employ project staff, but core costs of around £65,000 are the issue.'We often get asked "Why can't Golowan stand on its own feet?" My answer is "invest in us and we can" '.

The festival costs around £148,000 to organise and stage, and just about breaks even. 60% of the costs are covered by street collections (people attending give around £2,500), tickets sales, franchises, advertising etc,

The Golowan band processing around Penzance

Festival costs are going up by around 10% every year. They include all sorts of things that did not feature in the days when it was first set up: health & safety (lots of ladders are used), risk assessments, licences, transport, insurances, public liability, security, contractors, site crews all have to be paid for.

Golowan has got funding for and successfully run a series of projects, which provide some element to fund administration but it places huge pressures on a small but committed core staff.

The New Oppportunities and Neighbourhood Renewal funds have supported projects like 'We know our place' and 'Word of mouth'. These interpreted people's sense of place in arts and writing projects. Heritage Lottery funds supported the creation of a Newlyn heritage trail, which followed the success of the Penzance town trail. The next parish phase, the Mousehole trail, is being planned. Golowan's arts network team have created banner and flag schemes throughout Cornwall. Most recently they created the 'Ordinalia' angel banners, flying high on the Penwith skyline, to mark the performance of the Cornish medieval mystery cycle performed in its entirety in St Just in summer 2004.

Golowan is also the custodian of 180 cassette tapes recorded in the mid 1980s for the Penwith community archive's oral history project. They represent an extraordinary resource of dialect, accent and social history, and they are fast deteriorating. If an application to the Heritage Lottery Fund is successful, the tapes will be copied to longer lasting digital media, and made available for academic and local study. They could inspire a wealth of interpretative and educational projects

Some of the schools whose hundreds of pupils look forward every year to taking part are beginning to say they can't justify the £600 needed to pay for professional artists' fees and materials in making giant images and floats for the processions. This view among some schools is probably based on an assumption that Golowan is funded by the Arts Council, local authorities etc. Over the next few months Golowan will be working to ensure children can be fully involved in their celebration of place and still fulfil the deamnds of their curriculum - another potential sticking point for some. Hall states that 'additionality is the bugbear of arts organisations nationwide. It is unfortunately very difficult to find monies from arts funders to do what is intrinsically and provably worthwhile'

Hall has a novel suggestion, based on the evidence of Golowan being a community initiative and high profile marketing event for the area. 'After fouteen years it's worth thinking whether we've built up enough support within the local community to see Golowan receiving some funding through a local council tax precept. For example, there are around 10,000 households in the Penzance parish. £1 per household would bring in £10,000. But we also need to look further afield. We have run a small friends and business scheme for a number of years. Now it's time to launch a patrons' scheme, directly aimed at businesses and richer supporters who want to be part of Golowan's work, helping us to fund new projects and ideas'.