Strong Island

Save Portsmouth’s Cultural Services

Monday, February 15th, 2010. Published in Miscellaneous by

Portsmouth Cultural Services got in contact with the news that Portsmouth City Council have published their proposed budget cuts for the next 3 years, which heavily impact the city’s cultural services. To be specific the cuts include the following:

  • £9,000 reduction in grant to aspex and SCATs
  • £133,300 of cuts to the Parks Service, including £5000 saving on fertilizer which will lead to pitch quality degradation, £5,000 saving on the Sports Initiative which could threaten some small scale community sports events. £14,500 for 1 FTE Sports Development Team post and £33,00 for 2 FTE Contract Management Team posts which would leave contractors with less supervision and therefore less protection of the use of
    taxpayers money.
  • £35,200 from Museums for 2 front-line posts and one technician who builds and maintains all the displays in all the museums to be replaced with part-timers, jeopardising continuity in the museums offer.
  • £1,500 less to be spent on promoting events!
  • 1 day a week reduction in Central Library opening hours.
  • 50% reduction in the searchroom opening hours at the City Museum and Records Office.

And much, much more (for full details see the Council report (PDF)). Yet again, culture facing total cuts of £481,700 is being seen as a soft target.

But you can do something today by join the cause to save the things you love that are under threat. You can post a comment to your local councillor on their website here and they will make sure that it reaches them! Or join the Facebook cause.

PCS suggest that in your post you include your name, your ward and that you refer to the services that you use and demand that they are protected. If you are not sure of your councillor or ward, you can find that
information here. Also you can always write to your councillor by using the Write To Them website.

All a little strange considering the city council are bidding to make Portsmouth a City of Culture…if we don’t make our voice heard now, we can’t complain when cuts take place.

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1 Comment to Save Portsmouth’s Cultural Services

  1. This is all quite horrible (and also worrying for my extended family as my boyfriends uncle is the displays technician at the museum). Anyone who gives a shit about Portsmouth being a decent, cultural and diverse city needs to speak up about things like this – a decaying seafront is not enough to attract people to visit or live here!

    Sarah on February 17th, 2010

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Features

PRIMARY – Extended & Improved

Friday, January 27th, 2012. Published in Art, Craft & Design, Features, Photography by

We have some great news about our PRIMARY phonography exhibition (find out all the details here) that we can now announce:

- The deadline for submissions has now been extended to Sunday 4th March. We have had some incredible submissions but want to set aside more time to make the exhibition something really special.

- The competition is now open to up to 10 submissions from each individual. With the ability to capture many photos on your phone over the next two months we we want you to not feel restricted to just three. The same rules apply about the photos conforming to compositions using the primary colours though. If you have already submitted feel free to send more photos over as and when you please.

- The exhibition will be hosted by Albert Road’s own Bonzo Studio who are also partnering up with us in the creation of the exhibition space. More news on this soon!

- Finally, we will be running a competition as part of the exhibition where the best three photos submitted will win some incredible prizes. We will be announcing the prizes available very soon but got to say, these will be the best prize haul we have ever offered.

- We will be putting together a poster for the exhibition that will be on sale on the opening night. The poster will feature some of the best submissions and all profits from the sales will go to a local charity (details to follow soon). Due to this we need to say that any photos submitted to PRIMARY will involve you giving us permission to use them for commercial purposes, if you do not want your photo used in this way simply let us know via email.

Well, that is it for now! We really hope to drum up as much coverage locally for PRIMARY in the next couple of months so if you could Facebook/Tweet/+1 about the exhibition we would really appreciate it. We would love this exhibition to be a real reflection of the whole population of Portsmouth with everyone taking part and feeling involved.

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It’s going to be a Strong Movember – Closed at £725

Friday, October 28th, 2011. Published in Community, Features, Local Events by

Righto chaps, it’s time to clean shave your boat race and get that mighty moustache on the grow in support of Movember for The Prostate Cancer Charity and the Institute of Cancer Research. For 30 days of November you can help support and raise awareness through selflessly parading your top lip for charity.

You can sign up yourself, as I’m sure many of you already have, or you can join the Strong Island team and seek out sponsorship as a team. Through the Strong Island Movember page you can ask people to join the group, make donations, upload photos and post updates via the MoSpace page, Facebook and Twitter.

Head over to www.mobro.co/StrongIsland if you would like to get involved and grow a Strong Moustache to help raise awareness, or simply head over to www.uk.movember.com and sign up to personally raise money.

The funds raised in the UK support the number one and two male specific cancers – prostate and testicular cancer. The funds raised are directed to programmes run directly by Movember and our men’s health partners, The Prostate Cancer Charity and the Institute of Cancer Research. Together, these channels work together to ensure that Movember funds are supporting a broad range of innovative, world-class programmes in line with our strategic goals in the areas of awareness and education, survivorship and research.

Poster: Tristan Savage

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