$30M awarded to Culture and Creative Industries grant ‘winners’

Some 30 Guyanese have each received $1 million through the Culture and Creative Industries Grant programme, a Culture, Youth and Sport Ministry initiative intended to advance the country’s creative sector.
The grant awardees, chosen from over 200 applicants, collected their grants during a prize-giving ceremony at the National Cultural Centre on Wednesday.
Culture, Youth and Sport Minister Charles Ramson jr highlighted that the grant’s scope of participants was a deliberate policy put in place to ensure inclusivity, diversity and equal participation from Guyanese across the country.
“It is not just diversity in appearance and diversity in the projects, but it is also diversity in the location, all of which combine into the creation of this invisible fabric called our culture, uniting our people,” Ramson said.
Grant awardees, chosen after several steps – including an open application, a multistage assessment project and a final interview – are expected to use the award to help them advance their projects and overall businesses.
“You tend to see, despite people being amazingly talented, they have not been able to monetise that into a sustainable version, where it gives them a progressively higher level of income,” Ramson said, adding that the Culture, Youth and Sport Ministry initiative is helping to shift how those in the creative industry go about their talent development and business operation.
“In our grant, we’re not supporting [just] a cultural activity, we’re supporting a cultural activity that is intended to be an available and sustainable benefit for the society,” he explained.
The grantees now form part of the cohort of cultural and creative ambassadors the Ministry has created to establish support and shared knowledge within the creative sector. “This cohort is so that they understand that they also belong to each other. they have an obligation to assist each other, and also they have an obligation to [support] everyone who comes after them,” Ramson said.
“Every year, when we enlarge this group, it is not a group that functions in isolation or in an enclave; it is a group that must band themselves to see the upliftment of our culture,” he explained.
The Ministry also recognised the talents of several Mashramani competition winners, awarding them their respective prizes at the ceremony.
Ramson announced that 2024’s Mashramani Calendar of Activities would include a new competition: Dancehall Monarch. “We know that chutney is authentically Guyanese, soca is very West Indian, and so is calypso. What else is authentically West Indian? Dancehall,” he said. “We are now going to explore, and once successful, it is going to become a firm part of our calendar of events for part of our Mashramani festival.”