Wow... I can't believe it! We won our second grant from our state government... and that is pretty weird, seeing as the hit rate for these things is astoundingly small for groups of our size and age! We (and everyone else...) were crazily surprised when we won our first one for the launch year of our ensemble...

... and this time, we had a grant in to help with the commissioning of a composition for one of our concerts and guest artists this year. We did have a grant for a larger amount in a different round, but we didn't succeed on that one. However, we had a smaller request in for the smaller round, and got that one! Of course, the way that we build these things... we have multiple contingency plans, and the concert and commission would have gone ahead... just on a different and much tighter budget.

These grants are quite strange in the way that they work... for me, the logic of them are a little bit weird. But sadly, that is the way that they are done!

So, that makes a hit rate of 2 from 4 over the last three years! Yay!!!!...

... and we are now writing up another grant to help us expand an existing regional tour. We have three concerts lined up in regional centres, and if we manage this grant then we would be able to add a few extra education and outreach projects on either side of an otherwise busy period but short period.

This will be a crazily long shot application to the federal (national) funding body... and we are only just technically eligible for the regional touring grant. I'm pretty sure that ours is a pretty weak case as far as these things go...

But this is more for the practice of grant-writing for the national level than it is for the actual project itself. Regardless of the grant outcome, the concerts go ahead... but the education/outreach will be more difficult and then we would have to scale that end of things back.

Anyway, I'm projecting a rejection of our application... but like I said, it is for practice. But still, that does mean that I have to try and organise a tour... and I guess that it is also practice for future tour organisation.

Everytime that I start working on this application I wish I had staff to do it... but those are needless expenses, I just need to focus and start getting emails and contacts out... but we have left it on the late side of things, as we originally weren't eligible as we had only two concerts... the third one only came in recently, and then I was reminded that we were eligible to at least try our hand at it.

Eeeep... this thing gets to snowball a bit! And in the future, I need to plan these things further out... perhaps a year or two at a minimum. Speaking of which, tentative planning for some things have already started for 2026!

ARHGHGGHGHGHGHGHGHGHGHGHGGHGHGH!!!!!

We still need to finish finalising all the things for this year!

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