Today’s guest post is from a small charity which I support called Arts Emergency. It was set up by the comedian Josie Long, and fundraiser Neil Griffiths, and I’m thrilled to give them the opportunity to explain a bit more about what they do and why. As well as all the info that’s on the website, you can keep up to date with their work on Twitter

The Arts Emergency: a generation of young people are being incentivised to disengage from humanistic study. Don’t stand for it.

It seems education as a whole is increasingly building for short term profit, and the skills we now champion are those that aid this through business and industry.

As we now know, in reality this has meant that academic disciplines caricatured as having no clear economic utility have had their public funding withdrawn entirely.

Yet those very subjects – the arts, the humanities and the social sciences in particular, are unquestionably vital to a diverse economy (the creative industries alone constitute nearly 10% of all enterprises in the UK, not to mention the fact more jobs than ever before require degree level qualifications to enter). Even seen through the relatively narrow ideological prism of those depreciating these skills and curiosities (of vital human importance) – it seems at best a counterintuitive act, at worst an act of deliberately gross cultural and social vandalism. Remember too we are suffering cuts in schools for music, and the closure of public libraries. Continue reading →