AusArt Day<\/a> will be held on Thursday, with 65 musicians and music organisations calling for donations from a total of 355 participants across the arts sector, hoping that people will still be able give to the arts during a cost of living crisis.<\/p>\nGordi has built a devoted following and successful international career – her 2026 EP Nylon charted before it was even officially released, with advance copies selling out.<\/p>\n
She also sits on the council for advisory body Music Australia and says the music industry is only just beginning to tap into the potential of philanthropy.<\/p>\n
“Sometimes we rely on on government to fill those market-failure gaps but sometimes we rely on community as well,” Gordi says.<\/p>\n
Among those from the music sector participating in AusArt Day are Melbourne community radio station PBS and the Perth International Jazz Festival.<\/p>\n
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Singer-songwriter Alice Hurwood is another, hoping to raise $5000 to help record her second album after a year performing in Europe.<\/p>\n
“I’m back home and ready to dive into my new collection of songs from my experiences abroad and bring them to life in the studio,” she says in her fundraising pitch.<\/p>\n
“Making an album as an independent artist is a big undertaking and I’d love your help to make this one happen.”<\/p>\n
Half a dozen orchestras from around Australia are also calling for donations, among them Melbourne Youth Orchestras, which is raising money to buy a flugel horn, using the tagline “We’ve been frugal but can’t afford a Flugel!”<\/p>\n
The first AusArt Day in 2025 raised more than $2.42 million from 4768 individual donors, according to figures from Creative Australia.<\/p>\n
Half of those donors had never given to the arts before, while three quarters of participants said it had helped improve their fundraising skills.<\/p>\n
But it appears the cost of the 2025 event to taxpayers, taking into account donations from various levels of government, actually exceeded the amount provided by private donors.<\/p>\n
Creative Australia spent $630,000 on grants, training and campaign development, while in South Australia, the state government provided $800,000 to match private donations for Country Arts SA and the State Opera.<\/p>\n
And it’s not hard to pick out AusArt Day participants that have faced significant funding challenges in recent times, such as Brisbane’s Metro Arts and the Griffith University Art Museum.<\/p>\n
Creative Australia, which has an annual budget of more than $300 million for 2025\/26, maintains AusArt Day is about more than raising money.<\/p>\n
“This event is more than a fundraiser – it is a national public movement that celebrates and elevates the role of the arts in Australian life,” it says.<\/p>\n
A federal parliamentary inquiry into arts and cultural philanthropy held public hearings in 2026, but is yet to issue it final report.<\/p>\n
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Gordi remembers receiving government funding early in her career but says philanthropic donations would have helped too.<\/p>\n
AusArt Day is encouraging people who have never donated to the arts before, she says.<\/p>\n
“These projects that are calling for donations, a community of fans can be part of that experience directly, and I think that is going to be more and more important moving forward,” she says.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"It’s nearly midnight in the UK and Australian musician Gordi, aka Sophie Payten, is on the road after…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":931890,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[64,63,44],"class_list":["post-931889","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-australia","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/931889","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=931889"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/931889\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/931890"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=931889"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=931889"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=931889"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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