This week Creative Scotland announced that it was closing the Open Fund for Individuals to new applications due to the Scottish Government being unable to confirm the release of £6.6 million Grant-in-Aid budget in the current financial year 2024-2025 (all currently submitted Open Fund for Individual applications will be processed as per the published Guidance).

This is devastating news – the Open Fund for Individuals is one of Creative Scotland’s key funding programmes, vital in supporting the activity of writers, artists and other creative practitioners in Scotland.

WGGB has been campaigning against cuts to arts funding at a local and national level. Last year, WGGB members in Scotland showed the power of their pens when they joined a successful emergency campaign to overturn a plan by the Scottish Government to make a £7 million budget cut to the arts funding of Creative Scotland (read all about it).

And in the WGGB manifesto we released in the run-up to the General Election, our call for a sustainable sector included a recommendation of increased and improved routes to direct funding for freelance writers (read all about it)

Following the announcement this week that the Open Fund for Individuals would close, the WGGB Scotland Branch called an emergency meeting in Edinburgh and officials also attended a meeting of the Scottish Trades Union Congress.

We will continue to keep members posted.

What you can do

• WGGB members in Scotland can write to their MSP to protest about the closure of the Open Fund for Individuals (find out how to contact your MSP)
• Share this on your social media channels – here is a draft post:
  “I just wrote to my MSP <insert name> to protest the closure of Creative Scotland’s #OpenFundForIndividuals”
• If you’d like to get involved, contact our regional assistant organiser joe@writersguild.org.uk.

Photo: Shutterstock.com/UlmusMedia