Round one: a review of applications to our Arts Fund

We are part way through the first round of applications for the Arts Fund, which opened to applicants in April this year. This is a new way of working for us, using application rounds, a new application form and a new assessment framework.

As we come to the end of the first stage assessment process, this blog shares some reflections on the round so far, including some emerging themes and analysis which we hope are useful for unsuccessful applicants as well as those who are planning to apply to us in the future.

First, a few headlines on how this round shaped up. We closed on May 31st with 345 applications to review. For context, between 2021 and 2023, we received 297 applications per year on average. 

We recognise that for applicants, the increased demand for resources can be disheartening to see. But this is exactly why we decided to move away from our always-open, rolling applications model, towards a funding rounds model. It enables us to see the breadth and diversity of the cultural sector, to make sense of the applications holistically and, hopefully, to make better-informed decisions as a result.

The majority of people who applied for funding in this round had never applied to us before. The next largest group were people who had applied but not been funded in the last five years.

We can also see how new and returning applicants compare, which shows that new applicants have a different profile to those who have applied before.

On average, new applicants:

New applicants also represent a more diverse group of leaders, even more so when compared to applicants to the previous iteration of the fund (the Arts Access and Participation fund) between 2021 and 2023.

We have now shortlisted 40 organisations from the 345 who applied and we’ll be talking to them in the next few months to support our final decision-making.

Of these shortlisted organisations, there are proportionally:

• fewer first-time applicants 
• more applicants who have been funded in the last five years
• more applicants who last applied to us more than five years ago

We have a few observations on this:

As well as understanding why people didn’t make the shortlist, we also have some emerging themes about why organisations did make the shortlist.

As we have explored in more detail previously, one of the ambitions of the fund is to support organisations who are looking beyond project-based co-creation as a means of addressing cultural inequalities, using an anti-racist lens. Some of this is about who is applying – our assessment framework considers whether the leadership of an organisation represents the communities they serve and/​or if they are changing their governance and leadership models to centre community voice and agency. 

However, we have tried not to be too prescriptive, recognising that long-term change requires many different approaches working together. There are many other ways which we think that organisations can embed anti-racist practices and equity in their organisations as well.

Shortlisted applicants are thinking and working intersectionally, recognising the complex ways in which systems of oppression are experienced by each of us differently rather than treating communities as single entities. In parallel, they recognise that contemporary issues such as the climate crisis, cost of living increases, housing shortages, disability rights, migration and policing are inextricably connected.

Embracing this complexity has wide-ranging implications for organisations. It means that they think deeply about their impact and work towards change on longer-term horizons. It means that their creative output makes visible connections between issues which are often presented as disparate and it means that they centre the whole lived experience of whoever they work with, whether that is artists, audiences, staff or other stakeholders.

Consistent amongst many of the organisations we have shortlisted is a commitment to questioning who creates art and which platforms they are afforded to showcase their work. 

In response, these organisations are holding spaces for artists and creatives to develop rich communities of practice, interest and identity. This includes programming and commissioning, artist development opportunities, and work to spotlight and celebrate artists and their communities. 

Through the fund, we want to support knowledge sharing, questioning and open conversation about how change happens. This is common amongst the organisations in the shortlist, and we think that this kind of healthy internal challenge and desire to keep asking bigger questions of themselves is significant when working towards long-term change and working iteratively.

Below are some observations and emerging themes we noticed in unsuccessful applications. As above, we recognised these quite consistently across an application, rather than being located in one specific area that we were assessing.

Something which was shared by many of the unsuccessful applications we received was a desire to develop best practice within access, diversity and participation – bringing more and different people into the cultural sector and audiences and participants. 

As we have stated in our new fund criteria, our desire is to support organisations working towards long-term structural and cultural change in the sector, rather than further honing the existing model.

Most applicants are working towards making art and culture more accessible, but for many unsuccessful applicants this was the extent of their ambition and their applications were focused on creating impact through discrete project delivery. 

Stronger applications of this type were often underpinned by well-developed co-creation principles and weaker ones sometimes ran the risk of more extractive or deficit-based approaches but, regardless, they didn’t demonstrate the kind of wider impact and expansive thinking that shortlisted applications did.

Organisations often listed many community groups and other partners they were working with but without telling us how they worked together, which gave us very little indication as to the depth and quality of these relationships. They also listed projects which were targeted at communities with different protected characteristics but which did not demonstrate a strong understanding of intersectionality.

This often correlated with another theme we noticed, which was that many unsuccessful applicants’ approach to learning and reflection was focused on data collection, statistical analysis and demographic data, often blurring into areas such as audience development and grant reporting, but with less thought given to how change happens and to how organisations learn. 

This learning could also be seen as more insular, and there wasn’t much evidence of ambition to effect wider change amongst peers or the sector through their work. 

We know the time and effort that goes into writing applications, so we are sharing these observations to give anyone planning to apply in the future more clarity about the types of organisations that we are looking to support. 

As we move through our second-stage assessments with shortlisted organisations, we expect to learn a lot more from them and to build our knowledge accordingly. We’re committed to sharing more as we do this and to sharing real-world examples of how the portfolio is taking shape.

If you are interested in applying to our Arts Fund, find out more about our next round of funding and our Q&A webinars to help you make an application.