Last year, Resident Advisor finally discovered they had no God-given right to exist. The pandemic took away huge swathes of their income almost overnight. Indeed, for a time, it looked like the company was at very real risk of collapse.
So they applied to Arts Council England – although Resident Advisor does have premises elsewhere in the world, they were founded in London – for a whopping £750,000. This money, according to the publicly available application form they submitted, was primarily to get them through the period between October 2020 and March 2021.
They got the money. One condition of being awarded the dosh was they had to publicly say thank you for it. The company now seems to be slowly recovering and in recognition of the new mood, has hired a new editor in the form of Whitney Wei – who has so far done, er… well, not much, really.
It’s nice to know they’ve retained a sense of humour after everything they’ve been through, though. For on Tuesday night they ran a conference call on Zoom. And the topic of this call? How to apply for grants and other money from government quangos.
And people say that Resident Advisor doesn’t know what it’s talking about half the time. In this case, I’d say you couldn’t ask anyone better…