A Meeting with Arts Inc. Community Interest Company

Cafe Rendezvous for a Meeting With 
Arts Inc. Community Interest Company

I met up with James Galloway at Wigtown in Cafe Rendezvous to discuss Arts Inc. Community Interest Company. This is a super exciting project where primary children and elderly dementia suffers come together to produce stunning modernist art work, of local places of interest to create a fabulous board game of the town. They have already created a Wigtown board game and are currently working on a Whithorn edition and hope to also move on to make board games of of other royal towns in the Wigtownshire area.

The project is not only fantastic in that it is enriching the lives of the people working on the project, but its also very educational for the children bringing in core curriculum subjects like history, geography, art and maths.

What the Arts Inc. Community Interest Company aims to do is to bring the board games to market and also teach the children business skills. They have created a salable product but to get the game manufactured in volume they need funding, and here is where it all becomes a numbers game and a catch 22 situation.

The project have been applying for grants and funds from local organisations and are waiting to hear back from these applications. Today we talked about the possibility of local business sponsorship and Crowdfunding as well as websites that sell downloadable products worldwide.

We did talk about the the Local Co-op Community Funds. The Newton Stewart and Wigtown Co-ops work together on this and three charities from the local area are selected and the Co-op raises money for them for a whole year through their members card scheme. This year it’s the Galloway Fisheries, the Traditional Music Festival and Wigtown Bowling Club.

What Arts Inc. Community Interest Company is trying to achieve is a brilliant - wonderful for the towns and marvelous for the people involved in making the art work and talking about the towns rich past. It's such a shame that this wonderful projects lacks funding when its oozing with so much enthusiasm.