Always on
This project successfully funded on 23rd December 2024, you can still support them with a donation.
Poetry for All 2024 Fundraiser
York, United Kingdom
Aim: Raising funds to stage a fully accessible, inclusive, hybrid, live arts event
About Us
Poetry is an amazing art form but is often wrongly considered ‘off limits’ for people who have difficulties with hearing. And venues in a mediaeval city like York can be difficult to access, let alone navigate, for blind, visually impaired or otherwise disabled people, especially wheelchair users.
(All images have alt-text describing them; video has a link to a separate video description below.)
‘Poetry for All is part of the York Disability Week programme. An important aspect of the week is to promote accessibility in the arts – for performers, audience members, technical staff – just as in other walks of life. Our aim each year to promote an equal, inclusive and accessible York and Poetry for All captures so well just what that is all about.’ – Marilyn Crawshaw, Chair of York Disability Week planning group
Poetry for ALL brings the joy of poetry and the spoken word to all. Our events are specially created for people with sight and hearing impairments, and wheelchair users, but are open to everyone with an interest in the spoken word. We use fully wheelchair-accessible venues, and provide BSL interpreters, text on screen projections, and audio descriptions where required to ensure that as many people as possible can access the events. We also explicitly support a neurodivergent-friendly environment, and actively encourage Covid-safe behaviour. Poetry for All was set up and run by Rose Drew of Stairwell Books with support from Fay Roberts of Allographic Press.
‘A bloody brilliant night - the most accessible and thoughtful poetry evening in York. I had the honour of performing a few years ago at the first event and was flabbergasted by the talent and the level of dedication of Rose and her team’ – HA Thorpe, writer and performer
‘I attended the first Poetry for All event in 2018 and found it eye-opening, both as a disabled poet being given the space and the support to perform my work and as an audience for the work of others. For me, poetry is about finding ways to say things when non-poetic language isn’t enough, so opening up the medium to more kinds of communication is a win for artists and audience members alike.’ – Becca Miles, Writer and Artist
(Video description available here: https://bit.ly/vdCMPfA22)
Why Are We Here?
We’ve been doing this since 2018 (with two years off during the beginning of the Pandemic), and we’ll be bringing our usual range of amazing performers to the National Centre for Early Music on 29th November 2024. We always pay our hard-working artists and interpreters a decent fee and expenses (no “doing this for exposure” here!), and properly accessible venues are always more expensive to hire. A small amount of local funding has been made available to us (up until 2023 our events were always fully funded), but nowhere near enough to cover our costs. We had applied for funding to Arts Council England for this and a tour across the year of three further dates, but were, unfortunately, unsuccessful yet again.
So now we’re looking to our community to help us fund the event - we will be able to make a fair amount of the money required on ticket sales and merchandise (Poetry for All anthologies, bespoke notebooks, printed programmes of the event, Poetry For All badges, and bespoke BSL fingerspelling cards) sales, but we need help to pay for the venue hire, and our amazing interpreters and artists, along with the videographer who will be livestreaming the event for accessibility as well as recording it for posterity.
In order to put on the event in fully hybrid form, we estimate that it will cost us £2,930 and a conservative estimate of how much we can make selling tickets and merchandise on the night nets us about £1,720. Obviously there’s a significant shortfall there, even if we hit what we’d expect in sales! So we need your help to make up the difference and ensure that we can pay our artists and interpreters without going into debt ourselves.
What We’re Spending This On
Where We Hope to Bring In Some Money
What Do You Get for Helping Us?
Apart from the warm sense of satisfaction of not only being a patron of the arts but supporting making arts more accessible to everyone, you can choose from whole host of rewards available to suit a wide range of budgets. Everything from a Hearty Thanks for £1 through merchandise and copies of our anthology from last year (£10) to mentoring sessions and private group workshops in performance and writing skills, and for creatives who want to learn how to plan their projects more effectively and market themselves/ their projects with some bespoke advice (£100) all the way to a grand reward for one poet of a publishing package with Stairwell Books (£250)! The workshops will be run by either Rose Drew or Fay Roberts, depending on which one you choose, and you can find out more about these very experienced, friendly workshop facilitators here.
Thank you so much!
If you can’t pledge anything at this time, we’d love you to share this campaign with as many people as possible. There are social media sharing buttons at the top of this page. Please feel free to tag us in on Facebook, X/Twitter, Instagram, or BlueSky and use the tag #PfAFundraiser24 – we’d love to hear from you. If you have any queries, please don’t hesitate to email us on [email protected].