This broad set of benefits was the projects undoing. When I met with numerous potential museum, heritage, culture and visual arts funders each in turn said that it did not meet their criteria because it sounded too much like heritage work, too much like visual arts, too much like the museums responsibility, too much like community art, too much like MA or doctoral research, and on, and on. It seemed that it met no funders aims completely besides ACE who are by far the most open minded and centralised funder of the arts, and despite the projects relevance to all of the other groups, no one else would support it. As usual though, all of them wanted to be kept informed and would be interested in benefiting from any potential research.
Then almost out of the blue, Renaissance East Midlands made a provisional offer to part fund the project if it formed a research document that would go onto a much larger regional project that they would fund the following year. I sent them a formal proposal and waited for confirmation. It seemed to good to be true.
In the mean time I put in a basic ACE application to cover things like travel costs and a small fee to cover the time I intended to spend working within the museums, and later interviewing.
Several weeks past and the debacle of the Olympics draining funds from ACE hit home, with many of my peers having funding bids turned down on the basis of lack of funds in ACE. The Leicester City Gallery had to let some of its staff go, and among other losses was an offer of limited financial support for my travel, plus a few paid lectures that I had been relying on for some staple income. This also brought about a change of the off-site team, and a completely different attitude towards the project. This came alongside my own ACE application being turned down on the basis of financial restrictions and lack of perceived benefit, being that I had posited the project purely as research.
