Our anniversary gifts

Paul Hamlyn Club Awards

£2.5m shared between five performing arts venues in the UK for work on community engagement

The Paul Hamlyn Club Awards were made to five performance venues across the UK to support audience development activities with a particular focus on extending access to sections of the community not currently attending performances.

The recipients are: Citizens Theatre, Glasgow; Hall for Cornwall, Truro; Opera North, Leeds; Royal Liverpool Philharmonic, Liverpool; and Sherman Cymru, Cardiff.

The original Hamlyn Club, at the Royal Opera House, was created in 2005 as an audience engagement initiative, building on the success of the ‘Paul Hamlyn performances’, which for 20 years targeted people who had never attended a performance. The club offered subsidised tickets through a flexible booking system and tailored information about productions. More than 5,500 new people attended the Opera House during its five-year span until 2010.

This gift was made after the end of the 2012/13 financial year.

Jaipur Foot

£1m endowment to Bhagwan Mahaveer Viklang Sayahata Samiti (BMVSS, also known as ‘Jaipur Foot’), for the Paul Hamlyn International Centre for Prosthetics and Orthotics

Jaipur Foot makes and fits prosthetic limbs free of charge. Its support for disabled people, particularly the poor, enables them to regain mobility and become self-reliant and fully participating members of the community. Since its inception in 1975, Jaipur Foot has helped rehabilitate more than 1.3 million people, making it one of the largest organisations supporting disabled people in the world.

The gift is an endowment to support the ongoing work of BMVSS in making and fitting prosthetic limbs, and to support the work of the
Paul Hamlyn International Research Centre for Prosthetics and Orthotics.

Reading Activists

£1m gift to The Reading Agency for the ‘Reading Activists’ programme

The Reading Agency was founded in 2002 and was supported by the Foundation early in its life. Its mission is to give everyone an equal chance in life by helping people to become confident and enthusiastic readers. It focuses particularly on people who need extra support to become readers – children in their formative years, disadvantaged young people and adults with poor literacy skills.

This anniversary gift supports the national roll-out of The Reading Agency’s ‘Reading Activists’ programme, which aims to engage 30,000 11–19 year olds through a range of activities including the creation of 6,000 volunteering opportunities and a programme of creative reading and writing road-shows.

This gift was made after the end of the 2012/13 financial year.

Circuit

£5m gift to Tate for Circuit: A national youth network for the visual arts

Circuit is a programme for 15-25 year olds being rolled out across the country through a partnership of art galleries.

The six lead organisations are Tate (working across its four galleries including Liverpool and St Ives), and five partners: firstsite, Colchester; MOSTYN, Llandudno, North Wales; Nottingham Contemporary; Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester; and Wysing Arts Centre in collaboration with Kettle’s Yard, Cambridgeshire.

The partnership aims to reach 80,000 young people over four years, providing opportunities for young people across the UK, particularly those who have the least access to the arts, to participate and shape their own cultural experiences.

Paul Hamlyn Roundhouse Studios

£5m endowment to the Roundhouse Trust to underpin the work of the Paul Hamlyn Roundhouse Studios

The Roundhouse Studios work with around 3,000 young people (aged 11–25) a year, providing opportunities for training in creative industries including music and video production, radio and filmmaking. The work of the Roundhouse – the iconic performance space in north London – feeds into the activities of the Studios, and the money raised by the Roundhouse business is channelled back into the Studios’ work with young people.

Forty per cent of the opportunities at the Roundhouse Studios are taken by young people whose circumstances mean they might not otherwise have been able to access them.