Are travel costs/accommodation eligible?
CCS cannot fund travel or accommodation costs for activity taking place outside your area.
Travel and accommodation costs for projects taking place within your area are eligible. Examples might include:
- Travel and/or accommodation costs to bring in a visiting artist to teach or present work
- Travel costs to take a group of young people from one part of your district to attend an arts event in another part of your district
Is Food eligible?
Reasonable requests to provide food for artists, participants, and audiences for community arts activities is eligible.
Are maintenance costs for arts equipment eligible?
CCS cannot support the buying or maintaining of capital items. This includes repairs on venues, servicing photographic equipment, etc. An exception to this might be the tuning of a piano where the tuning of the piano relates specifically to the project that support is being sought for. Applicants who want support for buying or maintaining capital items will need to go to other funders. A database of potential funders can be found in Fundview (which can be accessed free of charge via your local library). Applicants can also search for funders that support arts and cultural projects via the Ministry for Culture and Heritage website.
What should we do when there are ineligible costs in the budget?
We want applicants to show the full cost of their project, however some of these costs, such as the purchasing or repairing of capital items might be ineligible. As long as there is other income in the budget that can cover the costs of these items this is not a problem. You can tag the CCS funding to the eligible costs and make sure this is noted in the letter to the successful applicant.
Are projects allowed to make a profit?
Budgeting to make a profit: Applicants should not be expecting CCS to support them to make a profit. However, sometimes a project does make a profit.
We expect CCS applicants to present an accurate budget, backed up by quotes or past history, which shows what is required for the project to break even. CCS can then fund the anticipated shortfall. CCS funding of more than the anticipated shortfall should only be given if the committee believes that the costs and/or income have be inaccurately estimated.
Sometimes applicants inflate costs or minimise projected income sources, such as ticket sales, to reduce the risk and increase the chances of making a profit. It is appropriate for them to be wisely conservative in their estimations of other income. It is up to the administrator and assessment committee to pool their knowledge to identify how accurate a budget is.
Remember that CCS cannot support fundraising i.e. an applicant cannot request support for projects that are donating funds to another cause. In effect this would result in CCS funds being allocated to that cause. However, it is appropriate for charities or other groups to independently fundraise at events that are supported by CCS.
Unexpected profit: If, as a result of unexpected ticket sales or donations, for example, a group does make a profit, they do not have to return funds to CCS. We would expect that the extra money is either used as part of that project, to cover ineligible costs or for another similar project/activity.
Money in the bank
It is not uncommon to receive an application from a group that has enough money in the bank to potentially cover the costs of the project. However, these funds are sometimes tagged to other projects (e.g. development of venues or purchasing of equipment) or reserves held to make sure that the group or organisation remains viable or can close down or transition in a steady way if something unforeseen happens (staff illness, earthquake, etc).
If an organisation does have significant reserves we would expect them to clearly articulate what these are being held for and why they can’t use these for this project. An administrator may need to request this as additional information once the application has been received.