Grants database

Attitude is Everything supports the music industry to improve deaf and disabled people’s access at music venues and festivals. This grant enables the organisation to develop and expand its programmes, increasing its evidence base and ability to influence the industry and policy. Attitude is Everything will grow and diversify its team of ​‘Mystery Shoppers’ who rate music events for accessibility, increase relationships with smaller and grassroots venues and increase sign ups to its ​‘Charter Programme’, which recognises good practice around arts access.

ARC Stockton is a multi-artform performing arts centre. In partnership with The Albany (Deptford), it will explore whether a free ticket scheme for primary aged schoolchildren can provide every child with the same early access to the arts, regardless of background. It will trial a new model of fundraising, using philanthropic giving, as a potentially sustainable means to support this scheme in the future.

OPEL will bring together two existing advocacy/​campaigning projects, Still Human Still Here and Regional Asylum Activism. OPEL will be hosted by City of Sanctuary and will take forward the eight advocacy priorities identified at the Sanctuary Summit in November 2014 and endorsed by 320 organisations. The project will work at local, regional and national levels to secure concrete improvements in both policy and practice towards asylum seekers and refugees.

GMIAU works to ensure access to justice for people living in the local community who are survivors of torture, trafficking, abuse and conflict. GMIAU will co-design an advocacy service model with unaccompanied migrant children, young people and service providers in Manchester and Sheffield. This will involve a comprehensive mapping exercise of services in these cities, primary research with young people and service providers, and a learning exchange with organisations that developed a similar model in Scotland. They will produce a report and options paper, which will be disseminated via a national conference.

Bolton Lads and Girls Club is one of the largest youth centres in the UK. It plans to trial a new approach to supporting and integrating young refugees, in partnership with local organisations working with refugees/​migrants. It aims to better meet the social and emotional needs of young refugees and improve relationships between them and young people who have lived in Bolton all their lives, reducing potential tensions. Learning about the role of youth organisations in supporting the integration of young refugees and migrants will be shared widely in the youth and refugee/​migrant sectors.

Whole Education is a partnership of schools and organisations committed to providing an engaging and rounded education in English schools. This project will explore and test a ​‘flipped learning’ approach to arts education. Working with four secondary schools, it aims to improve the quality of arts education, particularly for disadvantaged young people, and enable teachers to share practice in flipped learning and use of digital resources. This is where instruction or exposure to new content takes place outside of class using digital resources, while class time is used for active learning, and deeper exploration of content supported by teachers.

Contact Theatre is a national contemporary arts organisation that places young people’s decision-making and leadership at the heart of its work. This grant will support work with an external consultant to explore the business development opportunities for its highly successful leadership programme Future Fires. It will develop a sustainable mixed income model for the programme to enable it to achieve its ambition of rolling out Future Fires nationally.

Robert Allen has worked in business development for over 10 years. He has extensive commercial and non-profit sector experience, having been Director of South Cheshire Chamber of Commerce and Director of Partnerships at a Crewe Housing Association. Robert believes that established business accelerator and incubator models (both public and private) focus solely on a small elite number of start-ups, early-stage, growth-driven companies, excluding would be entrepreneurs from less well-off social and economic backgrounds who have no or low incomes. He wants to design and deliver a radically inclusive start-up accelerator / incubator for people with no or low income and create a social movement that builds sustainable businesses, one that embraces alternative finance models, delivering social and economic change and ultimately bringing inclusivity to start-up ecosystems across the UK and beyond.

Nick O’Shea set up Ignition Brewery in 2016 aiming to improve employment opportunities and quality of life for people with learning disabilities. Ignition will develop and trial ​‘Salesforce Assemble!’ a training programme for their members with learning disabilities to provide them with the skills and confidence to become effective sales people for the brewery. In doing so, they hope to demonstrate that a sustainable organisation can be created by identifying, utilising and rewarding the talents of their team and to contribute to reducing the 93% unemployment rate among people with learning disabilities.

Over 3 years, Imagineer, their partners and 40 practitioners will work with 450 children and 30 teachers and senior leaders in 15 Coventry primary schools. The Imagineerium, is both a ​‘maker space’ within the Daimler Powerhouse and a teaching approach, which creates an engaging dramatic frame and motivating real-world context for children’s STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts and Maths) learning. Costumed Imagineers will commission the children to design and prototype mechanical milestones for a new city-wide cycle trail to celebrate Coventry’s history of bicycle manufacture.

Serious Events Limited is committed to ensuring that music is accessible for all. This grant will support regional venues in programming high quality and diverse music, as well as initiating audience development and participatory work. Serious Events Limited will create an additional post in the company’s Learning and Participation Department, enabling the company to partner with 14 organisations in England, Wales and Scotland. They will develop a venue network to share practice. The Serious New Audiences ticket scheme will be extended nationally. Serious Events Limited will deliver a training programme for musicians, from diverse cultural backgrounds, to develop skills in participatory music-making. Finally, Serious will develop a rigorous evaluation framework to demonstrate impact.

Manchester International Festival (MIF) is an artist-led, biennial Festival presenting new works across the performing arts, visual arts and popular culture. This grant will support a step-change in the nature and scale of MIF’s local engagement, under the leadership of Artistic Director John McGrath. MI: Festival is a new year round programme that builds upon elements of MIF and John’s existing practice to broaden local participation and audiences. Central to this is a city-wide network of MI: Festival community advocates; engaged in festival development and delivery alongside a programme of neighbourhood and public realm participatory commissions.