Creative Foundations Fund

The UK’s cultural sector is significant for the economy, society, and local communities. However, many cultural and creative organisations are experiencing significant degradation of their buildings and equipment, which is impacting their operations, safety, and the attractiveness of their services.

The Creative Foundations Fund is an open-access capital fund that aims to support creative and cultural organisations in England in revitalising, restoring, retrofitting, or renewing cultural assets, including urgent work to address issues which prevent organisations from effectively delivering work for the public. This investment will result in organisations producing high-quality creative work, accelerate growth in the creative and cultural sectors, and make places more attractive to live, work, visit, and invest in.

The Creative Foundations Fund will focus on improving existing cultural buildings and equipment to improve the economic sustainability of the creative and cultural sector.  We expect organisations to take creative approaches with their current buildings to deliver outcomes such as, but not limited to, reducing operating costs and increasing revenue streams. The fund may support expanded cultural or creative facilities within an existing site where it contributes to the financial viability of the venue but not the development of new cultural buildings or adaptive reuse of existing buildings for cultural purposes.

We want to ensure that the projects we support are financially viable. We cannot provide additional capital or unplanned revenue funding if the project costs increase or your running costs are higher than anticipated. Applicants must consider the costs of operation, maintenance, upgrade, and eventual disposal of the assets and explain how they have budgeted for these costs in their applications.

All projects we support must meet the diverse needs of the community they work with. You must show you have consulted a wide range of people (e.g. children and young people, creative and cultural practitioners, workforce, volunteers, participants, visitors, and partners) and implement the feedback from this consultation into your project.

For more information, visit Arts Council England

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