Edinburgh Fringe Festival is always exciting and the last few days of the festival proved to be particularly exciting for our Funny Women Team, especially those of us who worked so hard on The Glitter Project.
On Thursday 22nd August, we learnt that we had been nominated for the Jones Bootmaker (ISH) Edinburgh Comedy Awards Panel Prize alongside Alex Petty for the Free Festival, Best in Class by Sian Davies, Cyclopath by Dion Owen and Elaine Robertson for bringing attention to the rising cost of accommodation during the festival. The aim of the Panel Prize is to highlight the support that individuals and organisations give to artists and those visiting and working at the festival.
The Glitter Project at the Fringe was created to provide both mentoring sessions and open mic nights as a ‘hands on’ way of supporting new and first-time comedy performers as well as more established acts who needed a confidence boost, advice and directing to resources. We’ve been delighted at the response that the project received, even to the point that our mentors were being stopped in the street to answer questions!
The Panel Prize was divided between all five nominees receiving £1k each. We were represented by two of our Glitter Project mentors, Louise Leigh and Pauline Eyre at the awards ceremony, (pictured below far right with Sarah Bowles co-founder of the awards) who took to the stage to accept the prize on behalf of everybody involved at Funny Women.
‘Proud doesn’t even come near how we all feel about this,’ says Lynne Parker, founder and CEO of Funny Women. ‘Louise and Pauline had approached me about running a mentoring scheme and some open mics during the Fringe so I pitched the concept for the BBC Comedy Grant, as part of a bigger initiative in collaboration with Jo Fletcher Cross, one of our non-exec board directors.
‘I was proud that we went on to receive the grant and then Russells came on board with some extra funding which gave us the means to run five events in total, three Meet the Mentors and two open mics.
‘As a non-profit organisation, it’s difficult to meet all of our aspirations and provide ongoing support for our growing community of brilliant female and non-binary of performers, writers and creators. The Fringe is one big creative melting pot and can be a very intimidating environment so we set out to provide as much support as we could.
‘ I’m sure that I speak for the whole team when I say thanks to Jones Bootmaker for our share of the Panel Prize and supporting comedy where it really matters.’
