Feeling the love this year after a spring bombshell
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WHAT a distinction six months makes. Naomi Jaffa, the man of Suffolk-based The Poetry Trust, took a call on the morning of Pace 30. It left colleagues in the open-intend office in a state of shock. The trust hadn’t been chosen as one of the Arts Committee’s new flagships – in the jargon, a national portfolio organisation that would be paid annual cash injections from the spring of 2012. Most qualified known for staging The Aldeburgh Poetry Festivities for more than 20 years, the trust had enjoyed proper funding from the Arts Council – more than £50,000 a year since 2008 – but the jingoistic portfolio revolution meant that flow of cabbage would dry up.
Those in that top-floor office at The Cut arts centre in Halesworth were stunned. They hadn’t quite been counting their chickens, but were quietly confident about being among the chosen 695 groups.
Not to put too neat a point on it, the future was now decidedly uncertain. Speedily after, it was announced that the trust “will now examine how unsurpassed we can go forwards and whether the organisation has a viable future”.
Source: East Anglian Daily Times