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Earlier this year, on February 26, the Barbadian platform Fresh Milk, which aims to support and empower contemporary Caribbean visual artists, made an announcement: the US-based Mellon Foundation had awarded the non-profit a USD 350,000 grant from its Arts and Culture programme. The funding, which covers Fresh Milk's operating and programming expenses from 2024 to 2026, will support the offering of artist residencies, lectures, screenings, workshops, conferences, exhibitions and projects, helping to make the region's cultural ecosystem more robust.

It is the first time that Mellon, which has traditionally limited this type of grant funding to American entities (though inclusive of Puerto Rico), has looked to partner with independent arts organisations beyond US borders; Fresh Milk is just one of several regional cultural NGOs that has received the foundation's support. But this is not the reason that its funding is a game changer.

For artist and founder of Fresh Milk Annalee Davis, Mellon's endorsement recognises the importance of supporting Caribbean cultural organisations, but she also hopes “that this vote of confidence […] will endear potential partners in the local and regional landscape to feel confident in coming on board as financial investors.”

The struggle is real. Despite the region's rich and diverse cultural landscape, Caribbean artists have limited options when it comes to funding support. A couple of exceptions to this norm are Cuba and Puerto Rico — the former because ever since the Cuban Revolution, the state has prioritised the arts as a means of cultural expression and national identity, investing heavily in arts education, infrastructure, and accessible programmes, and the latter because, as an unincorporated territory of the United States, the island has access to US funding.

In speaking with Global Voices via WhatsApp, Davis explained that while there is no lack of artists in the Caribbean, the ecosystem that claims to support them is inefficient. Outside of the two aforementioned territories, there is no Caribbean nation that can boast a fully functioning arts council.

CHASE, Jamaica's Culture, Health, Arts, Sports and Education Fund, is under-resourced; Barbados’ National Cultural Foundation often struggles to meet the needs of cultural practitioners; and while state bodies like FilmTT, Trinidad and Tobago's film commission, stated in a September 2023 press release that its Content Creation and Marketing Fund had “supported several film projects and creatives to the amount of [TTD] 250,000.00″ [just under USD 37,000] over the course of the previous 12 months, some industry practitioners wonder if it is having the intended effect.

One local director, speaking with Global Voices by phone, noted, “The budget for student films is USD 35,000 or less. FilmTT is splitting that budget among several people over the course of a year and patting themselves on the back because they're technically ‘funding’ a lot of projects, but it has no real impact.” Another Trinidadian filmmaker, who also spoke with Global Voices under condition of anonymity, said the country — and the wider region — has unique problems to solve. “To find our own prescriptions,” he explains, “you need to engage the people working on the ground.”

Independent arts bodies like NLS in Jamaica, meanwhile, do good work but are always in search of donors and funding. International agencies engaging in cultural diplomacy, like The Netherlands’ Prince Claus Fund and the UK's British Council — both with good track records of funding the arts in the region — no longer support nations that are deemed to be middle to higher income based on gross national income. Most Caribbean territories do not meet the criteria for official development assistance (ODA).

The economic reality, therefore, leaves far too many Caribbean artists with one of two options: leaving the field or leaving the country. Either way, the region loses. According to the Trinidadian filmmaker, the COVID-19 pandemic laid the harsh realities of the situation bare: “So many people have either migrated or come out of the industry entirely — and you can't entice them to come back because you're not offering anything.”

The Mellon Foundation's support has provided a silver lining, not just because of the amounts pledged, but because the funds are unrestricted. Calling the ways in which funds are “hardly disbursed” to Caribbean creatives “punitive,” Davis is excited about how Fresh Milk can challenge what she calls a “plantation mentality” by offering unrestricted grants to artists.

“It's very difficult for artists to get support,” she adds, as a result of “the continued impact of the colonial project.” Agreeing that the few funding bodies that exist are “really archaic,” Davis is amazed at how the plantation system “continues to permeate funding institutions and national cultural bodies.”

Trinidadian dancer and filmmaker Sonja Dumas, in an article on “the culture of cultural development,” observed, “The arts were, for a long time, simply the agent of a post-independence nationalist agenda, and [that] is the culture of how we still approach them. This vaguely proletarian notion that ‘culture’ is ‘the people’ and the people are the (multi-cultural) nation, is itself a culture — a culture of a few people at the top constructing and maintaining an ill-fitting patriotic narrative.”

Citing “a kind of ingrained cultural semi-literacy that is no fault of the population,” Dumas argued that lack of education in the arts is a direct contributor to how poorly creative endeavours are financially supported. She also noted that “in economic terms, artistic effort is not like the average commercial activity,” meaning they are labour-intensive, with low economies of scale and no guarantees — yet, “society would suffer greatly if there were no performing or visual arts in our lives.”

To this end, the Haiti-based Caribbean Culture Fund (CCF) has joined the landscape and issued its inaugural call for projects. The fund, which aims to “enable an innovative, inclusive, and socially transformative cultural ecology in the Caribbean” by supporting regional arts and culture in ways that are both “respectful of tradition” and culturally specific, was envisioned as a much-needed regional arts council. For now, however, the funding is coming from outside of the region, with this first call being supported by Open Society Foundations.

While many are comfortable with this kind of support, seeing it as a mechanism for reparations, others wonder whether the region itself — governments, corporate entities, philanthropists — will rise to meet the very pressing need of supporting its artists.

In an interview via WhatsApp, CCF Executive Director Kellie Mangus says that rather than depend on a few funders, which she calls “unrealistic,” the CCF's approach is to broaden the scope. The need is dire. The fund's first call — the recipients of which were announced on July 11 — was only able to award 16 grants; they received over 470 applications.

“Grant applicants need to understand that different donors have different priorities,” Magnus continues. Observing that the current lack of opportunity can sometimes create unrealistic expectations of the few opportunities that do exist, she believes that space must be made for corporate and private foundation arts funding — “a diversity of players to meet diverse needs.”

Seeking to move past a transactional model of funding, the CCF wants to focus both on making grants and providing information on (and support for) accessing other available funding opportunities. A recent grant the CCF received from Mellon will help in this effort.

The Caribbean Philanthropic Alliance (CPA), an organisation that is just two to three years old, but which Magnus describes as “people trying to do great things, making an effort to give cohesion to the sector,” is just one of the organisations the CCF is collaborating with in an effort to foster Caribbean pride and tell Caribbean stories. “It is this work,” Magnus explains, “that has the potential to erase colonial divisions. The creatives have the power.”

Magnus is very interested in having conversations about funding that include return on investment but which also go beyond. “The arts and culture have so much more to offer,” she says. “There are financial returns, but there are also community cohesion returns, mental health returns, personal satisfaction returns.” She is intent on making the CCF sustainable, building on the span of work that's already being done Caribbean-wide — “all the ways arts and culture can benefit the region.”

The CCF also has no intention of competing with local foundations. “We're going to aim for funding sources that are bigger,” Magnus says, “and therefore harder for people to reach on their own.” Along with like-minded organisations such as the CPA, she is “excited to see this growth unfold.”

This new funding approach bears in mind Dumas’ point about “the disconnect between artist’s vision, the intrinsic value of the art that he or she creates, and the person or institution charged to support it.” In the end, cultural development of the region can only be achieved when people become culturally literate, take pride in their cultural identity, strive for innovation, and be fairly compensated for their effort.