To better organise and attract funding support, players in the cultural and creative industries (CCIs) are being urged to have greater participation in their local association.

Co-founder and executive director of Kingston Creative Andrea Dempster Chung, who made the plea at a recent Jamaica Observer Business Forum, said that industry bodies are very important to the growth and development of ecosystems in any sector.

“Bodies such as Jamaica Film and Television Association (JAFTA) and the Jamaica Animation Nation (JAN) have been able to move farther ahead because of how organised they are. And this is why for us, as creatives, there was also the need for us to come together during COVID to form our own body, the CCI Alliance.

“A big call-out however, is for our creatives to join the industry association, have a voice, play your part, and know what’s happening,” she stated.

Dempster Chung — who went on to highlight the important work of the CCI Alliance which, since its inception, has been very instrumental in providing support for the sector — said that prior to its existence, interactions tended to be largely disjointed and individualised.

She said the body — which represents a wide cadre of talents spanning literature and publishing, film and television, animation, festivals, visual arts etc — has been allowing creatives to work together and share in matters of importance for the sector.

Programme manager for CreaTech Karen Hutchinson, further underscoring the need to have consensus around issues, said the process, which also allows for consultation, offers creatives a voice, providing them an opportunity to have a say in what it is they are looking for, instead of just designing programmes for them without their input.

Highlighting its hackaton and investor pitch initiatives as two significant programmes under CreaTech, which has been helping to do this, Hutchinson said the projects were designed to strengthen capacity within the sector and to date have been able to disburse more than $2.4 million in seed funding to creative entrepreneurs.

The non-profit organisation — backed by a host of donors and international funding partners such as the Inter-American Development Bank, World Bank, and the European Union with regional support also coming from bodies such as the Caribbean Creative Network — said it is very big on partnerships, especially at a time when it craves funding to move the sector forward.

Data from its 2021 annual report show the entity receiving the bulk or more than $60 million of the $74 million it earned in revenues from overseas grants. For that year its total revenues almost tripled the $24.8 million seen for the pandemic year when its overseas funding had dried up.

Dempster Chung, stressing the importance of funding to the work being done by the organisation, further called on local stakeholders to ramp up their support.

“Funding can never be too much so we welcome more support from corporate Jamaica and the Diaspora. I believe these players have, however, now started to see the value in what we are doing and are becoming more supportive of our objectives, so we look forward to engaging them,” she said.

“As an organisation we recognise that we cannot be grant-funded forever so it is also becoming more important for us to build our own entrepreneurship so we can have sustainability,” she added, noting the tours, festivals, and other cultural events staged by the organisation as the start of these efforts.