Justice, community and joy: reflections on our first Arts Fund grants

Two years ago, we started to rethink what was then our Arts Access and Participation Fund. We wanted to understand what in our Fund felt fit for today, and most importantly, for the future of the arts. We explored systems-change thinking and anti-racist principles, and thought about how our Fund could contribute as part of the wider arts and cultural funding ecology.

Our ambition was to create a Fund which could build on our existing access and participation agenda and centre values like justice, community and joy, exploring roles and spaces for art and artists in the just future that Paul Hamlyn Foundation as a whole is working towards. 

Our challenge then was to distil this ambition into applicant guidance and a new application and assessment process, hoping that it would resonate with the organisations we wanted to support and enable us to understand the richness and potential of their work. 

We didn’t want to be too prescriptive about what shape this work would take, to see if we could assess organisations on the principles underpinning their work and what kind of change they want to support in the sector and in society. 

In this piece, we’ll explore some of the emerging themes from the first round of grantmaking using this new criteria and process.

Our funding has always supported a broad range of art forms and this round of funding was no different.

While seeking to fund specific forms was not a part of our criteria, our eventual grantholders did strengthen parts of our portfolio where we had fewer existing grantholders. 

Many organisations work across two of more of these artforms, but broadly speaking, we increased our support to organisations working in the visual arts, knowledge production/​publishing, heritage and collections, and performance art.

As well as considering what the work is, we also are interested in how the organisations we fund work.

Much like art forms, this isn’t always easy to cleanly mark out. But our attempts to categorise some of this work show us perhaps the biggest shift between the previous iterations and the current version of our arts funding. Organisations we’ve funded in this round have strong thematic focuses in how they work, as well as in the art forms they practice.

Our previous criteria sought organisations focused on co-creation and engagement at a project level, which meant organisations often had a focus on embedding more equity and centring a diversity of voices. While we recognised the value of this work, it did not naturally suit organisations on the margins of the cultural mainstream. 

What if your work was not on a journey to becoming more diverse, but addressing structural inequalities and strengthening the communities you already worked in? How can organisations working towards deeper social engagement, not just trying to reach new audiences and practitioners, see themselves resourced through our funding?

We attempted with our new criteria to support organisations who were intentional about their role in supporting wider change in the sector and in society. Before, this was a more peripheral consideration of the Fund which meant how organisations organisations worked was not prioritised as much as other considerations.

What this has resulted in are clear clusters of practice across the grantholders. Integral to their art form is a way of working, from a focus on racial justice, to place-based approaches, to institutional critique and change.

Even with such diversity of art forms and practice, there are uniforming qualities we’ve identified across the people we fund. We believe in each, they:

• Recognise the connections between change at the individual, cultural and social level and they consistently reflect on their own place within this. 
• Know the histories, cultural movements and traditions their work has grown from. 
• Have a serious understanding of equity and social justice in both theory and its practical application in their work.
• Recognise that the wellbeing of their colleagues, peers and communities is fundamental to their own success.
• All work with a spirit of playfulness and experimentation.
• Have demonstrated resourcefulness, agility and pragmatism to manage through periods of precarity and under-resourcing. As a result, they really understand their identity, their practice and their mission.

In an earlier blog, we wrote:

We see the organisations that we are announcing our support for as representing that glimpse, offering a snapshot of some of the cultural movements at play in the UK today, and we’re excited to learn from them and share more about their work over the next three years.

Meanwhile, everything continues to move forward with the Arts Fund, as we are now in our second round of funding. We will share more details on this phase of the process in the summer, but for now, we are excited to continue the evolution of our grantmaking practice and to deepen our understanding of work at the intersection of art and social change.