Round two: a review of applications and grants in our Arts Fund

In July 2025, we awarded £6.5m in grants for the second round of our Arts Fund, distributing this funding to 32 organisations around the UK. As we did after round one, we are sharing some reflections on the round which we hope are helpful contributions to the field of work at the intersections of art and social change. 

We recently announced that we will not be accepting new applications for the upcoming financial year, focusing instead on existing relationships and on applications received in these first two rounds. Our hope is these regular blogs help make our processes and decisions more transparent.

These numbers are broadly consistent with the distribution in round one, except for organisations funded in the last five years, which increased from 34 organisations to 76, up from 10% of applications to 17%. We think that this can be explained by two factors:

1. The timing of round one meant that a lot of current grant holders weren’t yet eligible to reapply, which most likely pushed more into round two.
2. We more proactively encouraged all current grant holders to reapply if their grant was coming to end in the 2025/26 financial year, as they may not have been aware that we had moved to a funding rounds model. This has enabled us to give continuity to organisations we have decided to keep supporting and also to give organisations we are not going to continue supporting as much notice of our decision as possible.

Using the DEI data standard, which requires at least 75% of board and 50% of senior leadership identify with a shared protected characteristic, we identified that this group of 471 organisations included 49 which are led by people with lived experience of racial inequity, 34 organisations with disabled leadership, 27 organisations led by people who have experienced educational or economic disadvantage, 14 had LGBTQI+ leadership and 24 are led by people with lived experience of the immigration system.

Consistent with round one, these applicants are more likely to be applying for the first time. The data shows us that we are reaching a more diverse group of leaders and organisations through new applicants, as compared to repeat applicants. The distribution is also similar to what we observed in round one. 

While acknowledging the positive trajectory of this data, we also want to recognise the limits of using this data alone:

1. It doesn’t help us recognise intersectionality, which is a key focus for our fund and which we increasingly consider as a strength of many organisations we support. 
2. Organisations can be centring diverse leadership and voices without meeting the thresholds of the DEI data standard, which we recognise are quite high. For smaller organisations in particular this data is prone to fluctuate quite significantly even with individual staff changes.
3. It does not reveal the wide range of approaches to work at the intersection of art and social change which we observed within the applications spanning audience diversity, participatory art making, socially engaged practice, artist development, place-based approaches, organisational development, leadership development and infrastructural support. 

We want to continually reflect on our progress towards realising the ambitions of the fund and demographic data is one way of doing that – we cannot talk about supporting historically underfunded communities or working towards a more equitable cultural sector without considering who is applying for the fund. But beyond demographic data, we are primarily interested in applicants’ practice, values, and behaviours.

Where are different voices being centred, which approaches are bringing different ideas to the fore, and how is creative practice changing as a result? How do applicants reflect on their role within their wider ecology of place and/​or practice? These are the questions we are asking during assessment to identify organisations we feel are the best fit for the Arts Fund. 

This year we recommended 32 organisations to the portfolio compared to last year’s 29. Some headline statistics below outline how these recommendations compare to last year’s grants:

The major change here from round one is the number of recent grant holders we are recommending we continue compared to new relationships. Recent grant holders who applied had a success rate of 20% vs an overall success rate of 7%. 

Our assessment process is not guided by any targets in this regard, but we are always conscious of finding an appropriate balance between developing new relationships and maintaining existing ones. We feel comfortable that we have sustained relationships with organisations who continue to align strongly with the fund’s new aims whilst also ensuring that the portfolio continues to evolve with new organisations and new ideas.

In terms of geography, 17 of the organisations are based in London, two in Leeds, two in Bradford, two in Manchester and two in Glasgow, with the remaining individual organisations in Cornwall, Brighton, Oxford, Liverpool, Wakefield, Edinburgh and Luton. This is broadly similar in distribution to the previous round, in terms of the balance between organisations within and outside of London. Within this mix are organisations working nationally, locally, or both.

Our approach to grant making means that we have travelled across the UK to meet nearly all of the shortlisted organisations, which we find incredibly important when it comes to understanding different places and contexts and challenging our own biases and assumptions. Looking at the list of organisations we are funding in this round, we are excited by the work that all of them are doing to address structural inequalities – that is, long-standing and deeply embedded inequalities – within culture, regardless of where they are based.

We know that there is significant attention within cultural policy at the moment around geographic distribution of funding and this has been discussed by the team and with our trustees and advisors. We try to take account of the local context in our decisions, but our priority is supporting practice that is most aligned with the fund’s aims wherever that is in the country.

Across the grants awarded, we see a range of disciplines represented – theatre, visual arts, music, dance, heritage, film and publishing – alongside place-based approaches and infrastructural and knowledge production organisations. 

Thinking thematically, the grants build on intersecting clusters of practice already in the portfolio around racial justice, housing justice, anti-poverty and LGBTQIA+ justice. Many of the organisations play a sector support role alongside their other work, speaking to their willingness to collaborate and share resources to influence wider change and to their systemic analysis of cultural inequalities. 

In round one, at the same point in the process last December, we identified the following traits which we felt were shared across the 29 organisations we supported then, and which all remain true for round two’s group of organisations. They all:

• Recognised 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.
• 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.

This learning and reflection will inform our future assessment practice and decision-making approach. Our belief in the work that we are supporting and in the wider field has only strengthened over the last two years, and we are excited to continue deepening our knowledge and relationships.

In the next few months, we will also share the full list of grant holders from this second round of funding.