We need your support

This week, Dundee City Council launched a consultation into the use of a small proportion of its £493m annual budget. The council needs to address a projected shortfall of £8.4m and is consulting on cutting or ending funding for £4.2m of services, including DCA and our colleagues at Dundee Rep, Creative Dundee, Dundee Heritage Trust (Discovery Point and Verdant Works) and UNESCO City of Design.

If this sounds familiar, that’s because it’s less than a year since the last council consultation was published. Just like then, up to 100% of our grant – now £209,000 per year - from Dundee City Council is being tabled for a cut. 

We wish we weren’t here, asking you to help us again, so soon after the last time: but we fear that if there isn’t another wave of support for us and our colleagues across the city, this will be used as a reason to remove our funding. We would be incredibly grateful if you could complete the consultation here: we’re right at the end, on page 22, but you don’t have to complete every section to get there. See the link here.

Because we run DCA as efficiently as we possibly can, any cuts to our budget have significant impact. We work tirelessly to support the aims of Dundee’s City Plan, Tourism Strategy and Culture Strategy, delivering meaningful economic, cultural and social benefits for the people of Dundee.  However we can only do this with sufficient funding and without it we may be forced to scale back or revisit a range of projects and activities, including :

• Our offsite work in communities across the city
• Our work with New Scots, addiction recovery services and people with long-term health conditions
• Our planned young people’s film school
• Continuing to offer free tickets for schools to Discovery Film Festival
• Continuing to employ a full team of staff plus freelance artists, designers and tutors
   

The information provided in the consultation includes details of Dundee City Council’s annual costs for maintaining our building, which they own. This arrangement has been in place since before we opened in 1999 and remains a reflection of the council’s pioneering – and successful - vision of what culture can achieve for a city like Dundee.  We have been engaged in a steady process of reducing these costs for the council over the past several years, from taking on the management of our IT services to reducing our reliance on their finance services, and our long-term plans for the building would drastically reduce its energy use.  In the meantime, we can’t use their maintenance of our building to offset other cuts, and removing our annual grant would make it much harder for us to continue reducing our building costs. 

We remain so grateful for Dundee City Council’s support over the past 26 years: it’s only thanks to them that we exist at all, and their ongoing care for our building – which they own - speaks volumes about how much their own team values what we do. Unfortunately putting our funding up for consultation every year forces us to fight a very public battle over preserving it. We’d love to see a different approach to these conversations that treats us like the valued partners we want to continue to be. 

The consultation runs until Fri 19 December: please complete it and share it if you can: and if you think there must be a better way to manage the city’s spending, you can write to your local councillor to let them know.