Where will the AOG funding go? Tiers 3 and 4 results in charts

This morning, the full list of organisations and groups that have been offered funding through tiers 3 and 4 of CNZ’s new Arts Organisations and Groups Fund has been released. This fund is the new, and only, structure through which all multi-year arts organisations and group funding will be allocated. It is open for applications once a year. Arts organisations and groups who applied, in February or March, for funding over $125,000 per year were notified of their results last Wednesday. For many, these results determine if they can continue the work they do, or to what extent. The results came with very little explanation – a few generic lines about there not being enough money for everyone, and tough calls to be made. But where exactly has the funding landed?

We’ve combed through this year’s, and previous years’ results to illuminate how money is distributed. Here’s what we found.

Of the $201,579,318 requested, $104,170,885 was offered – just over half (51.7%).  96 organisations were offered funding for 1, 2, or 3 years. The majority, 82, have been offered three years of funding, and 33 of the organisations are new to multi-year funding, though have been funded by CNZ previously, through different routes. 

Tiers 3 and 4, the highest tiers of the AOG fund, are for organisations applying for more than $125,000 per year and $500,001 per year respectively. However, 30 organisations that were offered funding in these tiers were offered below that lowest rung ($125,000 per year) and five offers even fall below the rung for tier two, being offered as little as $20,000.

Most of the funding offered to individual organisations falls below $600,000 a year, but there are a few notable exceptions. Auckland Philharmonia Orchestra has been offered the most – $3,252,429. Next is the New Zealand Opera with $3,034,541, and then The Performing Arts Network of NZ (PANNZ) with $1,500,000. While organisations on the list are greatly varied in their scale and ambitions, it's still remarkable to compare these to the three lowest amounts, which sit at $20,000, $26,000 and $40,000 – there’s a whole extra group of zeros on the end.

To compare year-on-year changes to funding for individual organisations, The Big Idea’s Cultural Insights and Programmes Manager Sananda Chatterjee has pulled up previous funding results from Tōtara and Kahikatea programmes (which the AOG is replacing). The six organisations above represent the biggest proportional changes compared with previous funding. They are not necessarily the biggest dollar-value changes, and they do not tell the whole story of an organisation’s finances. Yes, this fund represents an eye-watering amount of money, but it is not the full funding picture for any organisation involved. CNZ generally does not fund more than 70% of an organisation’s recent average annual turnover, and many organisations receive funding from other bodies like councils, philanthropists, as well as having other income streams like ticket sales. 

There’s also a lot we don’t know yet. While CNZ has shared the full list of organisations that were offered funding, there may well be some that applied and were offered nothing at all. We are waiting to receive word on this, but in the meantime Sananda has done a little more digging. She has identified 28 organisations who we might expect to be on the list due to previously being funded by the Tōtara and Kahikatea schemes, but who do not appear. We can’t know yet if their applications were unsuccessful, or if they applied to a lower tier of funding (tiers 1 and 2 will be notified in September).

I created this graph using artform categories defined by CNZ in their results, but while they pulled out the number of organisations funded within each, I have instead calculated the monetary value offered. The lines between artforms were not always entirely clear – but in general if an organisation was Māori and didn’t state that its focus was on a particular customary artform or preservation of culture, I did not classify it in the Customary Māori arts category. Take Te Pou theatre, a kaupapa Māori performing arts venue. I placed it in the theatre category. The multidisciplinary category contains many performing arts festivals where theatre is a big focus but dance and comedy have a place too, so I believe that the theatre proportion is somewhat understated. 

The biggest category, music, is for the most part made up of groups who fit into the Western classical tradition – orchestras, operas, and choirs. One wonders if they might better fit into a customary Pākehā arts category, which would dwarf the Māori and Pacific categories of the same type. Theatre, the next biggest slice, also has the highest number of individual organisations funded (20). It's not surprising to see a big chunk of funding going to theatre – it's not new, and theatre companies and venues have high operating costs.

The small slice of comedy is due to the NZ International Comedy Festival which is being offered core operational multi-year funding from CNZ for the first time. Until now, it appears to have received only intermittent funding through contestable and project funding. 

CNZ presented just three ethnic categories in their results: Ngā toi Māori, Pacific Arts, and General Arts. As in the artform categories, there’s cultural patterns that aren’t highlighted by this simplistic division into three. There are blind spots. For example, while New Zealand's Asian population is approximately 17.3% (and growing) of the total population, the only Asian-focused organisation on the list is Indian Ink Theatre Company, which has been offered $347,488 a year, less than 1% of the yearly total. It's likely other Asian-focused organisations applied to lower tiers, but one must consider that that's the case for a reason – having only one out of 94 organisations in the highest tiers have an Asian-focus, when almost a fifth of the population is Asian, raises questions about whether structural barriers are affecting representation and access to higher tiers of funding, and well as the formation of organisations.

Due to the big smoke’s population of almost two million people, or about a third of the nation, we can always expect that the region will receive more funding than elsewhere. However, the chart shows that the amount of funding heading to Auckland is a little out of proportion – it is closer to 40%. It could be that organisations in Auckland are bigger, and thus more prominent in these higher tiers than they will be in the lower tiers of funding. Perhaps tiers 1 and 2 will be a bonanza of regional arts organisations – we will have to wait till September to find out.

More about the Arts Organisations and Groups Fund

Almost everything you need to know about the Arts Organisations and Groups Fund, by Claire Murdoch.

Thinking beyond reliance on state funding, by Gabi Lardies.