Member-funded infrastructure

A structural choice about where the money comes from, made before the institution needs the money. The alternative is not corruption or capture in any dramatic sense. It is the ordinary situation of a body that depends on one funder and therefore has one conversation it cannot afford to lose.

The evidence for taking the choice seriously is Korean. Busan screened a documentary in 2014 after the city mayor, who was simultaneously the festival’s chairman, asked it not to. The national film council cut the festival’s grant by roughly 45 percent the following year, and Busan was the only festival whose support was reduced. Prestige, international standing and two decades of results did not protect it, because none of those were what paid for it.

The trade is honest and worth stating. Member funding is slower, smaller and harder to start than a grant, and it will not build a fund of the size a levy produces. What it buys is the ability to make a decision the funder dislikes and still open the following year.

Source: Course-coined for this build. The Busan case is documented in the Korea material of the Hope research map, Instrument I and section 1.7: BIFF screened The Truth Shall Not Sink with Sewol in 2014, and KOFIC cut its grant from 1.46 billion won in 2014 to 800 million won in 2015, reported by the Korea Herald and the South China Morning Post, both free. The research base’s own conclusion is that a community-owned institution with diversified, non-state revenue would not have been exposed the same way.

First used in: 4.6 · Why you, and why this