How Small Cultural Projects Survive in Scotland

And Why They Matter

Last week, in my post about poetry pamphlets, I mentioned standing at the back of launches counting chairs. I wasn’t being metaphorical. It’s real life. And maths. Not quite the maths I expected to be using when a teacher once promised I’d “need this later.”

Thirty chairs out. Sixteen filled. A quick, silent debate about whether to remove the back row so the gaps don’t glare. Two people text to say they’re “just parking.” A group pauses at the door. Are they coming in? How many of them? Meanwhile, I’m calculating how many pamphlets we might sell if every other person buys one and three fabulous souls buy two. It is entirely possible to look serene while performing frantic arithmetic. I have practised.

Hunter’s Voice launch at The Hunterian Gallery

This is the part of small cultural life in Scotland that never makes it onto the Instagram grid.

From the outside, small cultural projects look charming. Intimate. Scrappy in a good way. The pamphlet press run from a spare room. A spoken word night above a pub. A choir rehearsal in a community hall that smells faintly of tea and disinfectant. A local book festival where the bunting has clearly seen previous summers.

From the inside, it’s spreadsheets and funding portals that crash just before the deadline. It’s emails sent after the day job is done and the dishes are stacked. The squeeze of trying to craft something meaningful in the narrow gap between paid work and ordinary life. Sometimes it’s a last-minute scramble to find the card reader and hope it’s charged.

And yet, small cultural projects in Scotland keep happening.

Which begs two questions: how do they survive? And, in the middle of a cost-of-living crisis, why should they?

The Funding Reality (Or, How Many Pots Can One Project Apply To?)

Let’s start with money, because we have to. Seriously, we always have to. Not what I dreamt of, but hey. OK, so it’s like a reef ecosystem. First of all we need the coral.

Scottish arts funding (through Creative Scotland or local authorities) can be the difference between an idea and an event with actual chairs to count. Even modest support changes things. It means paying a designer properly. It means an editor isn’t working entirely for “exposure.” Or booking a venue without worrying whether ticket sales will cover the hire fee. The writer can legitimately justify spending time on a manuscript.

But funding is rarely steady. It arrives in bursts, often tied to specific projects. Planning begins to orbit application deadlines. You become fluent in outcomes, evaluation frameworks and impact statements. Creative energy gets siphoned into forms and spreadsheets. Translating joy into measurable outputs is a peculiar skill, but many of us have learned it. When the funding doesn’t come through, the reef contracts a little. The idea shrinks. The print run drops. The back row of chairs quietly disappears. Occasionally the event doesn’t happen at all.

Private funding adds another layer: trusts, foundations, the odd local sponsor willing to have their logo tucked discreetly onto a programme. Sometimes a generous individual steps in because they believe in what’s being built. It’s a big fish coming in from the vast ocean with nourishment in tow. We’ll glide past the thornier questions about perfectly clean money and simply acknowledge that without support, many projects wouldn’t exist. Of course, access to that funding often depends on relationships and track record. If you’re new, small, or slightly outside established networks, you can feel like a tiny fish birling in a much larger current. Which is why so many small cultural initiatives depend on the most precarious and powerful force available: their audience.

When the Audience Is the Safety Net

Beautiful audience for Linden McMahon’s “All The Plants I Have Half-Grown” launch at Typewronger Books with Stewed Rhubarb Press. We even ran out of chairs! Hurrah!

Crowdfunding is now part of the survival toolkit. Pre-orders for a pamphlet run (seriously: pre-order when you can). A Kickstarter to underwrite a festival. A Patreon that keeps the lights on month by month. There is something quietly radical about that model. It says this matters enough that we will fund it together. It builds loyalty and shared ownership. It turns readers and attendees into stakeholders rather than consumers.

It is also exhausting.

Making art is only half the job. The other half is explaining it, promoting it, nudging people toward the link without sounding as though you’re clutching a begging bowl. What am I doing with my reef analogy – I think this marketing might be anemones and seaweed, calling out to passing schools of fish that fascinating, bright and colourful beings exist here. Creative time is spent selling. Crowdfunding only works if people already care enough to act.

Which brings us back to those chairs.

Small cultural projects survive because people show up. They buy the ticket. Fingers crossed, they also buy the book. If you’re lucky, they share the post even when the algorithm buries it (seriously, if you have friends who are creatives or like a creative’s work – share their stuff. It’ll make you look cool!). Brilliant folk volunteer on the door. The best audience members bring a friend who has “never been to this sort of thing before.” that becomes a lifelong fan. There is no community arts scene in Scotland without community participation. The reef depends on the shoals.

Also, I completely understand that in a cost-of-living crisis, asking someone to spend £10 on a ticket or £7 on a pamphlet can feel almost audacious. When energy bills climb and food prices rise, when the weekly shop feels like a negotiation, why would anyone prioritise a Thursday night poetry reading? It’s not a rhetorical question. It’s real.

For many people, there isn’t spare money. There isn’t spare time either. There’s work, childcare, caring responsibilities, exhaustion. When you’ve spent all day calculating what you can and can’t afford, culture can look like a soft extra. A luxury. A nice-to-have. So why bother with art when things feel uncertain? Why give up time and money for something that doesn’t fix the boiler or lower the rent?

Because if life becomes nothing but subsistence, something essential shrinks.

Art doesn’t heat your home. It won’t reduce your mortgage. It won’t stabilise the economy. What it does is remind you that you are more than a consumer navigating rising costs. It creates a pause in the grind. A space where you are not being sold to or measured or assessed. A room where people gather not because they have to, but because they choose to.

In difficult times, that choice matters.

A small cultural event is rarely just about the event. It’s about the walk there. The chat beforehand. Shared laughter that releases a week’s worth of tension. A wee sense that other people are also carrying heavy things and still turned up anyway.

When money is tight, spending it on art can feel counterintuitive. Yet that might be precisely when it becomes most worthwhile. If everything is reduced to survival, what exactly are we surviving for? Small cultural projects don’t ignore economic reality. They operate inside it. They stretch it. They try to carve out pockets of meaning within it. And sometimes, that hour in a room with sixteen other people is the difference between feeling ground down and feeling briefly, stubbornly alive. Also, it’s a wee break from it all and a lot cheaper than going to see the big American behemoth artist. Ok, maybe you should see them too. Balance is key for the ecosystem.

The balance is at risk. Behind most small cultural projects is an extraordinary amount of unpaid or underpaid work. Volunteer boards. Friends running the sound desk. Editors accepting less than their hourly rate because they care about the manuscript in front of them. Organisers answering emails long after their “real” workday has ended. Passion carries a lot, but it is not an infinite resource.

Many small arts organisations in Scotland are sustained by people giving more than is sensible. more time, more energy, more optimism than any spreadsheet would advise. That isn’t martyrdom; it’s belief. Belief that the room with sixteen chairs filled is worth holding open. Still, belief alone doesn’t pay rent. Which leads back to the larger question: if it is this fragile, why insist on keeping it alive?

Sharks on a Reef

Because small cultural projects are part of an ecosystem.

Back to our coral reef. The vast structures depend on tiny organisms. The coral needs the life that teams around it. Remove the small fish and the entire system shifts. What looks decorative is, in fact, foundational. If we want the big fish on the book shelves, in the theatres, the stadiums, the small screen and the silver one, we need everyone. OK, unless you’re a big David Attenborough fan, maybe you don’t want fish, but hopefully this image is making sense.

In Scotland’s arts ecosystem, the “small” spaces are where risk lives. They are rehearsal rooms and testing grounds. A poet reads new work without combusting from nerves. A theatre-maker tries something that might fail without it ending a career. A musician plays to thirty people and learns what holds.

You cannot leap from writing, alone, basking in laptop-glow, in your sitting room to a national stage without intermediate spaces. You cannot move from scattered journal publications to a full collection without somewhere to learn sequencing and structure. Small presses, fringe venues, grassroots festivals: these are the reef beds where talent grows.

If that middle layer disappears, the landscape becomes oddly polarised. DIY at one end. Major institutions at the other. All coral and sharks, no darting fish in between. The jellyfish swarm the coasts. OK, so the jellyfish are an image too far. I know, because I’ve got it wrong more than once in front of a small audience. For emerging artists, the cultural reefs are formative. They are not a luxury.

Culture With a Local Accent

Small cultural projects also hold something less tangible but equally vital: place.

Across Scotland, community arts initiatives are rooted in particular landscapes and communities. A Gaelic poetry night on Skye. A working-class writing group in Fife. A tiny book festival in the Borders where half the audience knows each other’s dogs. These spaces carry dialect, memory and local preoccupations that might not scale easily but matter deeply.

Larger institutions do ambitious and necessary work, yet scale can smooth out rough edges. Smaller projects can afford to remain specific. They can platform voices that are hyperlocal, idiosyncratic or unfashionable. Without that layer, culture risks becoming centralised and bland. The reef bleaches.

The mic ready for Shane Strachan’s launch of Dwams at Lighthouse Books with publisher Tapsalteerie.

Joy (Especially Now)

We often defend the arts in economic terms: tourism, regeneration, job creation. Those arguments have their place. They help unlock funding. They reassure sceptics. Yet reducing culture to economic impact misses something essential. In difficult times, shared joy is not indulgent. It is sustaining.

A room laughing together at a play. A young writer hearing applause for the first time. A conversation afterwards that drifts long past the scheduled finish. Surprising collaborations that become The Next Big Thing. These are small acts of collective affirmation. They remind us that life is more than transactions and bills. When money is tight, spending it on art can feel counter-intuitive. But perhaps that is when it becomes most worthwhile. If everything is reduced to survival, what exactly are we surviving for?

Sometimes the answer is simple: for the chance to sit in a room with other people and feel something together.

To step, briefly, onto dry land away from our reef: We have always done this. Long before funding applications and ticketing platforms, before print runs and venues with hire fees, we were people gathering around a fire, passing on stories in the dark. That instinct: to come together and make meaning out of noise, is older than any economy. It’s one of the things that made us human in the first place.

A small cultural event isn’t a grand spectacle. It’s just a modern version of that circle of light. A handful of people choosing, despite everything, to sit down beside one another and listen.

An Ecosystem, Not an Extra

Small scale allows experimentation. A pamphlet press can take a chance on a formally unusual manuscript. A grassroots theatre company can stage something intimate and strange. A local music night can platform a genre that will never headline an arena.

Because the stakes are lower financially, the artistic risk can be higher. Work that begins in a modest venue may ripple outward years later. The reef quietly shapes the ocean beyond it. If those experimental spaces vanish, the wider cultural landscape narrows. Fewer risks. New voices with no one to hear them. Fewer entry points means less people who grow creatively into the next big cultural expression.

Small cultural projects in Scotland are not decorative add-ons to a “real” arts scene. They are the connective tissue. They nurture talent, circulate ideas and create belonging. Their survival depends on a delicate mix of Scottish arts funding, private support, crowdfunding, ticket sales, volunteer labour and stubborn faith. None of it is guaranteed. Some nights there are sixteen chairs filled and fourteen empty.

So yes, you may still find me at the back of a room counting seats. Not because I doubt the work, but because I understand how much rests on those numbers. Each occupied chair strengthens the reef. Each absence leaves a small gap.

In a cost-of-living crisis, choosing to attend a poetry reading, a new writer’s play, going to a local event can look like a small, almost inconsequential act. It isn’t. It’s a quiet vote for the kind of ecosystem you want to live in.

Every ticket bought, every pre-order placed, every chair filled adds another flicker of colour to the reef. Without those small, deliberate choices, the water empties out. What’s left might function, technically, but it won’t be alive in the same way.

Small cultural projects survive because people decide they matter. Not in theory. In practice. In ten-pound notes and damp coats shrugged off at the door. So here’s the real question:

When the lights are on and the chairs are set out, will you come and take a seat? Or will you swim past and hope someone else keeps the reef bright?