Financial Assistance

We have established the Tait Emergency Relief Fund for Australian/New Zealand Artists to assist our talented young artists who practically overnight lost 6 months or more of work. Professional artists, some with losses in excess of £40,000, to artists just out of college who had a regular income of £500 to £3,000 per month which has now disappeared. Most, but thankfully not all, of the performing arts companies, who themselves are fighting for their survival, are claiming force majeur and leaving our awardees with no income and an uncertain future. Currently many of our artists can't get any assistance from the U.K. government stimulus package as they are self employed, nor do they qualify for Universal Credit because they are here on restricted visas and have no access to public funds. To fully comprehend how this crisis has affected our alumni attached below is a letter from Tait Awardee, NSW violinist, Bridget O'Donnell, and the attached video messages from Tait Awardees, Siobhan Stagg, and Andrey Lebedev.

In more normal times to raise funds for an emergency such as this a concert would be our standard response, but now with crashing markets, the economic uncertainty...and the real threat to our health posed by COVID19 we appreciate how asking you for financial help for our awardees may prove to be a step too far. Typically we'd produce a concert to launch the fund but as this isn't possible we have to be more creative.

"The COVID-19 epidemic has turned our world upside down. The arts sector has no doubt been hit hard with the limiting of gatherings and need for social isolation resulting in the closures of every type of performance venue from concert halls and theatres to function centres and pubs.

Im currently in my final year of my Masters of Arts degree at the Royal Academy of Music and with the closure of RAM, I along with so many others can no longer guarantee that well be even graduating in the summer, with limited ability to pursue our demanding performance schedule with no audiences to perform to. Alongside our studies, weve lost all our work.

My first cancellation came in the form of a standard performance at a memorial service on the 14th of March, cancelled two days before hand. One by one, the emails came in and every single performance in my diary from work with the English Chamber Orchestra and London Symphony Orchestra to the bread and butter gigs like weddings and Bar Mitzvahs being cancelled or if lucky postponed indefinitely.

The hardest ones to lose were the chamber music concerts with my quartet, the Hill Quartet. After months of preparation; getting grants for new compositions and working on programming interesting concerts, organising venues and ticketing, getting design work done and promotional work printed and the incredible amount of unpaid rehearsal time that goes into these concerts, to have no choice but to cancel them with no hope of when we might get the chance to put these concerts on is just the most devastating experience to go through. This isnt something we wanted to do, it was something we had to do.

All up I've had all my work, residencies and festival circuits cancelled through to August, but like every one else, no one in the Arts really has any idea of how long this will go on for. As a full time performing violinist this means that my entire income stream has disappeared. Every single cancellation was with no conciliation fee, with most of us acutely aware that if we demanded some kind of fee, the companies and venues that book us would go bust and there would be no industry to come back to when this is all over. Having already lost around 3,200 in forecasted income and being early in my freelance career with only very little savings behind me, the prospect of paying rent and bills for an unknown amount of time is terrifying. I have so many colleagues who will only be able to hold down the fort for a month or two before things get really desperate. With no governmental help laid out for freelancers as we dont have salaries, I dont see how any of us will be able to bear this burden.

With so many now spending time at home watching Netflix, listening to Spotify and reading books, it is worth remembering that almost every one of the artists who created that content, are freelancers. Freelancers, who took the risk of a less stable income in the pursuit of making great art for the people, and who now have no work"

Bridget O'Donnell, violin

Bridget was the co-founder of the Australian Bushfire Benefit London