Pros and Cons

Pros

It was a huge advantage having Falmouth University as a partner, and being awarded an Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) grant of £27,650 to enable research into the Soil Culture programme, starting with the Forum in July 2014. This also counted as support in kind in our Young Shoots application to ACE.

The success of our grant from ACE to support Soil Culture: Young Shoots was largely due to us being able to use match funding from residency hosts and the hire of the touring exhibition.

Sally Lai did a spectacularly good job as our Young Shoots Residency Coordinator.

Touchstone collaborations likewise succeeded in their devising of Soil Saturdays during the launch of the Young Shoots exhibition at the Create centre.

CCANW was awarded a grant from the Heritage Lottery Fund (HLF) to fund 12 Soil Culture activities, taking place during both Young Shoots and Deep Roots phases.

When our Deep Roots application to ACE failed, the strong support of our gallery partners in Falmouth and Plymouth was the only reason that the exhibition was able to continue.

The production of our Soil Culture publication was only possible because of advance subscriptions.

Cons

The failure of our application to ACE to support Deep Roots resulted in a crisis which put this stage in jeopardy and led to CCANW having to give up its office at the Innovation Centre and move to Dartington.

Despite 2015 being the UN International Year of Soils, we were very disappointed not to have received funding from DEFRA, the Environment Agency and many environmental trusts.