WCC UK Emergency Grants April 2020
by lizgloyn
The Women’s Classical Committee UK has, like many organisations, transitioned to online meetings for the foreseeable future. This means thatfunds earmarked for travel bursaries for postgraduate and early career researchers, and event catering will not be spent as planned.
We propose to make this funding available as emergency grants to precarious members and colleagues. At the moment, we have a limited pot from which we can offer up to 10 emergency grants of up to £100 per applicant to UK-based applicants. We are aware that what we can offer is unlikely to match the needs arising from the crisis, but believe that this is the best way to disburse funds intended to support students and precarious colleagues.
We will prioritise unfunded and unsalaried applicants who have lost paid work (both academic and non-academic) on which they relied for living expenses as a result of the Covid-19 crisis, especially those who are falling through gaps in government schemes. Early-career researchers, WCC UK members and those who have contributed to our work will be given priority in this initial round of grants, but we encourage any classicist in need to apply, including those working in classics-related creative arts and performance.
We will aim to run a further round of this scheme in the year, targeted at those whose employment or funding has ceased at the end of the 2019/20 academic year.
To apply for this funding, please email carolatack at gmail.com by April 13th 2020 with the following information (although we hope to make some initial allocations at the end of this week):
- Your current or most recent institutional affiliation or course (if you are a WCC UK member, we may well have this information already).
- Brief details of your situation: please tell us something about your situation along the following lines (these notes are not exhaustive):
- ‘had departmental funding for MA fees, self-funding for living expenses, no income now from zero-hours coffee shop job at xxx, applied for universal credit/government support programme xxx’;
- ‘in final unfunded year of PhD and now no hourly-paid teaching work for final term of year’;
- ‘recent PhD graduate; working with theatre company but now all performances cancelled, laid off from paid work and hourly-paid teaching cancelled’.
Applications will be reviewed quickly, by a small team of WCC UK committee members; all details will be treated as confidential. Payments will be made by bank transfer to UK bank accounts. You are welcome to apply to this scheme as well as to that run by New Classicists, although we are likely to prioritise those not covered by that scheme (i.e. those who aren’t graduate students).