IN what looks like a serious case of more haste less speed, ArtsACT has managed to sideline Canberra’s leading multicultural arts organisation from the government’s announced additional $1 million investment to the arts during the COVID-19 crisis.

For the founder and CEO of Kulture Break, Francis Owusu, it was a rollercoaster ride yesterday (May 14), with first a phone call from an ArtsACT officer asking the organisation to apply for the funding.

Momentarily thinking that at last Canberra’s leading arts funding entity was paying attention to multicultural arts, Owusu geared up to make an application, bearing in mind that Kulture Break’s classes and mentoring programs for young people, which started in 2002, had been severely jeopardised by the virus.

But Owusu’s elation didn’t last long. A second phone call from the same officer at 5.45pm who told him that on a technicality, Kulture Break was not eligible as it didn’t fit into the categories of “key arts and program organisations” named by ACT Arts Minister Gordon Ramsay on May 11.

Owusu, the 2013 ACT Local Hero of the Year, who was also selected by the ACT government as one of 14 most influential people in Canberra to act as a “champion”, is hopping mad.

Apart from the fact that he has applied for program funding due to be announced this month, which might make him eligible, he is appalled by the consistent sidelining of arts organisations that place prime emphasis on cultural diversity.

“It doesn’t represent what people know, people know we are a very multicultural society, where one in two people in Australia are from a non-English speaking background,” Owusu says, noting that not a single designated key arts organisation has ethnic diversity as its main thrust. And, unlike the sporting community, the arts have been missing in action when it comes to engaging people of divergent backgrounds as role models.

Kulture Break conducts music and dance classes like “Imagine Music”, “Ignite Ballet” and “Blaze/Inferno Hip Hop”, and it also holds mentoring and social skils programs, motivational talks and performances for schools, government agencies and community organisations and claims to have engaged with more than 400,000 young people in schools, jails and communities all over the world.

The current ACT “key arts organisations” are the ACT Writers Centre, Ainslie and Gorman Arts Centres, Belconnen Arts Centre, Canberra Contemporary Art Space, Canberra Glassworks, Canberra Potters Society, Canberra Symphony Orchestra, Canberra Youth Theatre, Craft ACT, Megalo Access Arts, Music For Canberra, PhotoAccess, QL2 Centre for Youth Dance, Strathnairn Arts Association, The Street Theatre (The Stagemaster), Tuggeranong Community Arts Association, and Warehouse Circus.

Owusu has approached the Minister’s office.

Arts organisations to get an extra $1 million