BARBADOS’ CULTURAL ENTREPRENEURS will not thrive unless they form associations to ensure they have “strong representation”.
That’s the view of Barbados Film & Video Association Inc. president Lynette Eastmond, who said having representative bodies was a strength of “traditional sectors” including lawyers, engineers, architects, chartered accountants, medical practitioners, and more recently the film sector.
Eastmond, who is an attorney-at-law, offered the advice last night while participating in a Barbados International Business Association panel discussion forum held as part of International Business Week 2015.
Addressing the audience at The Errol Barrow Centre for Creative Imagination, Eastmond said that while “many people won’t say it because it appears to be a criticism of the cultural entrepreneurs”, she saw the absence of representative associations as “one of the key elements missing in the cultural services sector”.
“What often happens in the cultural sector, I think, is that there is not this collection of individual working together and creating an environment where they can do what the doctors and the engineers do for their own people. I think that is lacking in the cultural industries, you need to have an organisation,” she said. (SC)
