Esmée Fairbairn Foundation
Mid-strategy review
Dr Tamsin Cox, Kate Rodenhurst and Dr Susanne Burns
May 2026
This report shares findings from a review of Esmée Fairbairn Foundation’s work on community-led art and creativity. Together with DHA, we would like to thank everyone who took part in the research, contributing their time and insights.
We also want to thank DHA Communications and their associates for all their work and analysis.
Esmée Fairbairn Foundation published its current strategy in October 2020 with three strategic aims: to improve Our Natural World; secure A Fairer Future; and nurture Creative, Confident Communities.
This report explores Esmée’s funding and support for ‘community-led art and creativity’, one of three priorities under the Creative, Confident Communities aim. All work under this aim is placebased and Esmée uses community/communities to refer to people connected by a place.
By commissioning this review, Esmée wants to understand how they are working in this space, what has changed in the context since they launched their strategy, and what progress has been made. The review also sought feedback from stakeholders on the opportunities for Esmée to add value.
Visit Esmée’s website to learn more about their strategy and support.
Culture and creativity bring people together and strengthen communities. They are intrinsic to how we understand and express values, experiences, meaning and hopes for the future. The shared vision that results from communityled, cross-sector collaboration demonstrates the potential of creative partnerships in delivering social, environmental, and economic wellbeing.
There are three long-term outcomes sought under this priority:
1
Local people and local artists lead creative and cultural activity in their communities.
2
A collaborative approach to creativity and culture enables people to work together to strengthen their community.
3
Local and regional cultural strategies are shaped by citizens and impact wider decision making and agendas for change.
The review was framed by six research questions, set out in the original brief:
The context for community-led art and creativity: what was it in 2020, and in what ways has it changed?
The need for Esmée’s support: what’s changed in the funding situation for community-led art and creativity from 2020 to 2025?
The opportunities for progress –what are the levers for change in 2025?
What are the blockers for progress in 2025?
What difference has Esmée’s work and funding made since 2020, and where is it struggling?
What feedback is there on the way Esmée is working in this space?
In the interviews, we asked funded organisations and wider stakeholders to describe the practice they undertook, or had involvement with, in their own terms. They used a range of phrases to describe their work: socially-engaged art, community arts, community practice, cultural placemaking, spatial justice, creative placemaking, youth work, democratic design and decision-making, co-creation, co-production and hyper local. Some use language which is strongly based within arts practice, and other were informed by community development, youth work or other communityoriented practices.
Interviewees were encouraged to use the language which is meaningful to them, and this range of terms reflects a wide range of practices and intended purposes. Throughout this report, however, we use the term ‘communityled art and creativity’ as an umbrella term under which all these approaches can be recognised.
Throughout the report, ‘Esmée’ and ‘the Foundation’ have been used as a shorthand for ‘Esmée Fairbairn Foundation’. The term ‘funded organisations’ refers to those organisations which have received support from Esmée via a grant or social investment.
The majority of Esmée’s support is in grant funding. However, they also make social investments (repayable finance), and have a Tools budget for activities where they have a more proactive role such as convening and connecting organisations, and commissioning research or other consultancy support.
Lots of the work Esmée supports contributes to more than one funding priority. For internal purposes, Esmée classifies work under a primary priority, and a secondary priority if appropriate. These charts show the amount of Esmée funding towards work that contributes to community-led art and creativity –either as a primary priority or secondary priority.
Total funding1
Support for work where community-led art and creativity is the primary priority:
awarded
Organisations awarded a grant or social investment by Esmée for the first time
1 As at October 2025.
Figure 1: Active funding where community-led art and creativity is the primary priority
Figure 2: Geographic spread of grants where community-led art and creativity is the primary priority
Of the 78 grants, 57 grants, totalling £10.7m, were for work in specific areas across the UK. These are reflected in the map by region. A more detailed breakdown of grants is on Esmée’s website.
21 grants, not reflected in the map, span multiple regions or countries. They include 2 grants, totalling £5.4m, to the Museums Association towards delegated grant-making for the Esmée Fairbairn Communities and Collections Fund.
Figure 3: Active funding where community-led art and creativity is a secondary benefit
Primary priority
Communities working together for change
Arts and creativity making change
Community driven enterprise and regeneration
Children and young people’s rights
Freshwater
Racial Justice
Migrant Justice
Fishing in tandem with nature
£795k (3 grants, 1 social investment)
£300k (1 grant)
£266k (2 grants)
£200k (1 grant) £189k (1 grant) £144k (1 grant)
£2.4m (9 grants)
£1.7m (17 grants)
Funding for this work is still limited, and competition is significant. There is still evidence that the work is not always well understood by funders, and that in the wider landscape of funding for art and creativity it has an uncertain place.
Material conditions (including the cost of living and decline of public and third sector services) have had a significant impact on the ability and capacity of communities, and services which support communities; this affects what those communities need and want from community-led art and creativity, and it also affects how or if they can engage in and support it.
Whilst community-led work is of increasing interest to some funders and policymakers, it remains a small-scale, fragmented sector which often relies on individuals, including freelancers, who are not wellsupported in developing their practice or career pathways. Organisational models are hard to make sustainable.
Reflecting the limited resources available to and from governments, community-led affected by the art and creativity is quality of policymaking and funding across sectors. This is not just about the amount of money available, but about whether policymaking is well informed by learning from on the ground, and whether it can be truly responsive to the complexities of the experiences of communities. Funding often operates in silos, or without reference to other investment programmes. This terrain remains challenging for organisations doing this work.
Political uncertainty is a concern for stakeholders at national, local and community levels. Organisations, and the wider systems they are in, find it difficult to plan beyond election periods, and there is concern that political change could lead to systems being dismantled or disinvested in. Politics affects the communities that organisations work with; it can create hostility to the work. More generally, organisations expect they will increasingly need to be able to address community conflict in their work in the future.
There are organisations and activities supported by Esmée exploring new territory, and practice which is founded on principles from community development, youth work, arts work, and a wide range of other influences. This work already benefits from collaboration and sharing, and there are key individuals in the sector who are influential, leading practice and encouraging others to explore it. There is more potential to support this sharing, refine our understanding of what good looks like and validate the practice in its own right.
Organisations are developing relationships with communities, and embedding themselves in those communities, in a number of different ways. There are examples of organisations: taking up disused community buildings and bringing them back into community use; basing themselves long-term in geographical communities, including living and working there; building and supporting communities of lived experience, reflected in the leadership of organisations; and developing community governance and membership models for their own organisations.
Despite the challenges around funding for this work, there is also evidence of funders learning from the work they fund, and developing models and approaches which are responsive to that learning. This includes longer-term funding, funding which engages in questions of community agency and collaborative strategic funding between partnerships of funders.
Whilst there is a range of work which currently adopts the term ‘placebased’ not all of it is community-led. There are clear opportunities for more community-led work to develop under devolution and other policy and funding programmes which focus on place. Place-based work also enables organisations to work across sectors, and across different policy areas, supporting new collaborations.
Although community-led work may often feel like an add-on, there is evidence that wider recognition of the need for this kind of work, and its value, is happening in a range of spaces, including: in the arts and cultural sector, amongst policymakers; at local, regional and national government, addressing questions of community trust and agency in politics and decisionmaking; and in public services.
Esmée’s support has had significant impact on community-led art and creativity, including:
Esmée’s funding approach gives organisations time, and allows them to be responsive when they are developing relationships with communities, and new activities or programmes of work. This flexibility is crucial to enabling community ambition and need to lead the work, rather than funder timescales. It also enables organisations to take up opportunities when they arise.
Esmée recognises that organisations are often exploring new approaches and trying things out. It supports them to take those risks, and sometimes this also enables organisations to persuade other partners to create space for those risks too. Key to the support of community-led art and creativity is the funding of work which explores new models for community governance, membership, agency and decisionmaking; within this is work which asks difficult and complicated questions about the role of the community, not only in this work but in wider society.
The way in which Esmée funds encourages organisations to develop their capacity. Esmée is a crucial funder, when organisations are in the early stages of gaining unrestricted support from other funders, in also providing unrestricted funding. Together, this kind of funding enables organisations which may have been working project-by-project to develop their operations and capacity. They are more sustainable organisations, able to plan for the longer-term, reflect on and develop their practice, grow staff and in-house skills and knowledge, and widen their ambition.
Esmée funds work which enables communities to address complex issues; it also funds work which allows communities to find and express joy, to develop creative skills, to celebrate themselves and everything they are, and to lose themselves in other worlds and ideas. This work is a crucial part of building community capacity, and more required as communities feel the combined pressures of cost of living, political uncertainty and other kinds of change.
Esmée’s funding is seen as a mark of status, that the work being undertaken has real credibility. As a leading funder in this area, Esmée is validating the work. It is also helping the sector, and others, to understand what good practice looks like. This reflects Esmée’s investment in new models, and also its investment in work which insists upon different and better ways of working, which include care for workers, reflect different practitioner and community needs, and which reflect deeply on what good community-led practice should be.
Following the findings of this review, we have grouped our recommendations together under three broad themes where we believe that Esmée could add more value in the future.
These recommendations do not require Esmée to alter its current array of funding approaches significantly, including grants, social investment and tools; but they may suggest some extension or variation on the detail of current approaches, and they do suggest an extension of some of the other activities Esmée undertakes as a wider stakeholder in community-led arts and creativity.
Together, we believe that these preserve the core values and practices which create meaningful impact in and with communities, and which the sector values in Esmée’s current approaches, and provide a basis for building sector and community capacity to extend ambitions and strategic potential in this area, and to validate and celebrate the practice.
There are three broad themes we recommend reflecting on and engaging in.
1.
Connecting and convening to support learning and influence
Esmée is a crucial and highly regarded funder of community-led arts and creativity; as a funder it is seen as knowledgeable, and the range of practice and organisations it supports are a source of intelligence about good and radical practice.
We recommend that Esmée utilise this unique position and role in order to:
• Support more connections between organisations and practitioners in the sector, enabling them to share their practice, learn from each other, articulate their work, extend their thinking and find space for strategic conversations about the future of the practice.
• Ex plore how more research, development and learning could take place. This should include
considering how to give a larger platform to the learning directly from Esmée funded organisations and activities, and how to support organisations and the wider sector in a robust beneficial cycle of learning, research and development.
• Convert the learning which Esmée gains from the organisations and activities it funds to greater influence. Esmée has a seat at tables which the sector, particularly smaller organisations, cannot access; Esmée could consider how it might mobilise the intelligence it gains from its support of organisations and activities, and how it might engage with that wider community of funded organisations when key opportunities to influence emerge.
Esmée is particularly valued as a funder because it recognises that organisations need to build their capacity, to move from project-by-project delivery to more strategic planning cycles. It is also valued because its funding priorities have extended under this strategy to enable awards to explore new and different models of community governance and agency.
We recommend that Esmée both continues and extends this approach, which is helping to develop and underpin the system of community-led art and creativity, by:
• Funding work which pilots and rolls out different models of community governance, community voice and agency.
• Learning from models and the practice of other funders who are examining routes to fund the development of community capacity.
• Encouraging organisations to develop further collaboration, within the sector and across sectors, through funding applications and/or funded activities; and considering how, as a potential funder, there might be the opportunity to help organisations engage and influence potential partners.
• Support organisations to consider and plan for capacity development in their funding applications, and engagement with Funding Plus support. Consider reviewing Funding Plus specifically, to understand how aware of it awarded organisations are, and what they currently need from such support.
Esmée’s funding practices are widely regarded as supportive and responsive to the sector, both within the funding relationship and more broadly in understanding the context in which organisations operate. Whilst the wider funding landscape is challenging, there is also evidence of funders making longer-term grants, or exploring new approaches. These reflect learning about what it takes to create meaningful impact in and with communities.
We recommend that Esmée continues to reflect upon its funding practices, learning from other, innovative approaches and considering where it might choose to vary or extend its current practice. In particular, we recommend:
• Recognising the fluidity and development of practice in this area, and the way in which applicants may meet multiple priorities or span different parts of Esmée’s strategy.
• Continuing to engage with other funders, where there are shared values and aims, in order to develop strategic and coherent funding opportunities to address the complexity and depth of community ambition and need.
• Considering the case for longer-term funding arrangements in specific cases, and how these might support or enable more cross-funder collaboration, collaboration between funded organisations and other sectors, and develop community and sector capacity.
This section summarises key findings under the following themes:
Under each theme we examine:
The context for this work, and particularly what we know about what has changed since Esmée’s strategy was launched in 2020. This section reflects what we have heard from funded organisations and stakeholders, and what we have learnt from the desk review.
The key challenges which funded organisations and stakeholders find affects what work they can do, and how they do it.
The main opportunities which funded organisations and stakeholders think are available for this work to extend its practice, and for interventions in this area to have greater impact.
The impact of Esmée’s support, including an overview of funding to this priority, examples of impact from the perspective of Esmée and funded organisations.
Across the four nations, national arts councils remain an important direct funder and development agency for community-led art and creativity. The role of arts councils, however, has come under increasing scrutiny and challenge. There have been reviews of the role and functions of arts councils in England (recommending changes to strategy, grant-making systems and the balance of local/regional/national decision-making) and Scotland (recommending a stronger role in advocating for, developing and influencing the sector), and organisational structure and change to the management of lottery funds in Wales.
The Stove Network
Funding for art and creativity in Northern Ireland has also been impacted by the fragility of the Assembly which had periods of suspension immediately prior to Esmée’s new strategy, and in the period since then. In 2024 Arts Council Northern Ireland published its first tenyear strategy, and was able to introduce a three-year funding cycle.
The interest in making cultural policy decision-making more local reflects a wider focus on the role of local and regional communities and representatives in policymaking. The English Devolution and Community Empowerment Act (2026) devolves more decision-making to sub-regional areas, through the creation of strategic authorities, and recognises culture as part of England’s devolution framework.
In Scotland, the new Community Wealth Building (Scotland) Act (2026) has five ‘pillars’ which include a focus on things like local procurement, ensuring that local communities gain value from local land and property assets, supporting more inclusive ownership and ensuring that finance support local communities.
In 2024 a new UK Labour government was elected. Devolved national government elections took place in Wales and Scotland in 2026, with a Northern Ireland government election due to take place in 2027. In recent years, there has been a significant upheaval of traditional two-party dominance, and there is evidence that this will continue both locally and nationally. Trust in governments is also at a record low.3
3 For example, see ‘BSA 42 | Britain’s democracy: A health check’ (Curtice, Scholes and Chabdu, 2025).
Community-led practice must make the case to funders and policymakers for its value. This means not only arguing for the benefit its outcomes might bring to communities, but also explaining its practices, and validating their basis in methods and philosophies that have been tried, tested and reflected upon. Many organisations still feel that policymakers and funders have a limited understanding of what the practice really entails, and what is required to do it well. For example, many in England feel that Arts Council England’s strategy ‘Let’s Create’ is the first strategy which really reflects their work:
…when Arts Council brought out ‘Let’sCreate’ there was a lot of backlash from some organisations about where, you know, where is the art?...‘Let’sCreate’ work[s] perfectly for us. You know, we’re already doing it…we’re having these conversations…We are about creating with people. We are about co-creation, but we also really value the art.’
There is concern that criticism of ‘Let’s Create’ (reflected in the recent Hodge Review) could lead to policymakers drawing back, and undo work done to build a proper understanding of this work. Organisations also find that they have to make the case repeatedly for involving culture in other areas of policymaking. There are also concerns that other trusts and foundations are withdrawing from this type of work:
Esmée Fairbairn is critical and becoming more important since others have withdrawn... [Esmée] are the most radical funder in this space.’
Forthcoming elections, and recent political changes in national and local government, create an uncertain environment for organisations and communities engaging in this work. The rise in nationalism and material factors like the cost-of-living crisis mean that politics within communities is changing.
Some funded organisations have experienced hostility to their work, or to the wider funder or policy-maker agendas which their work may be supported by. They feel less safe than they used to, and must consider their duty of care to staff, artists and their communities. As a result, they are making decisions about how to balance their desire to be as open and accessible as possible, with risk assessment around personal safety. Organisations are also concerned for the wellbeing of communities which are already vulnerable:
…I’m anticipating that [right wing agenda] having a stronger voice…and therefore services such as ours, with a spirit such as ours, potentially being marginalized; certainly we would anticipate the communities in which we work are being victimized or marginalized.’
Community-led work is not apolitical: communities are not apolitical, and conflict within communities, whilst it has always existed, is being exacerbated by this set of wider conditions. Not all funders and policymakers are prepared for the political nature of this work, and there is a sense that funders and other stakeholders (e.g. regulators) are not always tolerant of work which is explicitly political.
These political shifts have become a factor in the way some organisations programme, and how they publicise projects. There is concern that changes in political leadership at the level of local government may bring in more opposition to DEI-focused work. Given this, it is particularly important to organisations that local non-arts partners and stakeholders, e.g. those in education, health and social care, understand the value and potential of community-led arts. There is work to do to advocate for the inclusion of community-led art and creativity in strategic partnerships, local networks and increasingly, planning processes for regeneration in towns and neighbourhoods.
There is a sense of a ‘perma-crisis’: communities have not recovered from the combined effects of austerity, the pandemic and the cost-of-living crisis. Can policymaking really respond to these issues? There is concern about how subtle or locally responsive it can be when it comes from central government, and is often bluntly focused on one area of need, missing local knowledge and a more intersectional understanding of communities’ experiences. For small-scale organisations, doing community-led work, there is also the challenge of trying to collaborate with the many layers of agencies and services which often interact inefficiently, or in a way which is not permeable for independent organisations.
Since Esmée’s strategy was published, the 2024 Labour Government has pursued a policy of greater devolution in England. Devolution has already created some opportunities for culture to be a part of policymaking, and there may be more to come. For those working in communityled art and culture, devolution is also creating space in which there could be more opportunities for communities to influence policymaking, through the development of cultural strategies or investment plans which are directly informed by local residents.
There is a potential role for organisations with significant community-led practice and experience to facilitate these opportunities and build community capacity to engage:
…if you don’t invest right now in supporting communities to understand how to make decisions together and how to actually roll up their sleeves and do it, the devolution is going to become a hot mess.’
Beyond the specific opportunity of devolution in government, another area in which many organisations are working and see substantial opportunity is in place-based work. The term covers a range of practice as broad as communityled art and creativity, including work which focuses on specific outcomes (e.g. educational outcomes) and work which brings partners together (e.g. public services, local government, businesses, community-led organisations) on broader themes like regeneration.4
Whilst the community-led art and creativity work funded by Esmée is all ‘place-based’ in its broadest sense, there are funded organisations using the term ‘place-making’, which means that their work is contributing to the regeneration or development plans for an area, and crucially might come with a budget attached.
More broadly, this is an area of opportunity for funded organisations because it is an increasingly common agenda across different areas of
policymaking, with the potential for organisations to make a strong case for the value of their role in developing creative and equitable community-led approaches to decision-making, and advocating for things to be done differently. Newer initiatives, such as the Pride in Place investment programme, may help.
And there’s a research strand that we’re really interested [in]…not only informing our regional and local policies, but also being part of what is really quite a powerful movement in [nation] around creative placemaking and informing national policy and how that’s really valued cross sectors.’
Place-based or place-making work is one of the areas in which meaningful collaboration between different levels of government and between public services and the third sector feels more possible. It also reflects the sense that, despite declining investment in local government and public services, there is more potential for progressive and innovative work:
civil servants, local council workers, are quite radical, and they really do want to make change, and that’s a much more of an easy win than national government.’
The key question is whether this kind of emerging local work can sufficiently inform or influence national policy, and the distribution of funding and resources which might follow. There is also concern from community-based organisations, whose role may be to champion and support the community having a voice, about the risk of being co-opted into an agenda which they cannot sufficiently influence.
4 The recent ‘Place and Evidence in the UK ’ report, for example, identifies five different categories of place-based change, from continuous local social change to rebalancing civil society, state and market.
Esmée is supporting work that enables organisations to test and develop new models of community governance and decision-making. This includes initiatives that directly engage with policy and respond to opportunities presented by devolution, such as the work of Citizens in Power, New Art Exchange (supported through the Citizens in Power-led network), and Trinity Community Arts, a key partner in delivering the UK’s first regional citizens’ assembly for culture, which is actively planning for the long-term legacy of this work. These are new approaches, and Esmée is supporting the testing, learning and development of practice from this, funding work which may be risky because we don’t always know what will come out of it. Crucially, Esmée support is helping others take that risk too.
I guess it’s just recognizing that there’s a huge amount of time and energy and investment that’s gone into setting up the programme, and…what [Esmée] support allows us to do is then to honour the things that come off the back of those ideas and those suggestions [from communities]…without this funding it would be really difficult to know what those outcomes and outputs look like, and to learn from them, and only then really can we understand whether the process has worked.’
Funded organisations are also being supported to do deep, long-term, placebased and place-making work, such as: The Stove Network and its work in Dumfries and Galloway; No Fit State in Cardiff, which works within one square mile; or Back to Ours in Hull which works across multiple neighbourhoods across the city.
There are also organisations being funded to undertake work which addresses conflict and division, like Féile an Phobail in West Belfast which is equipping young people to build relationships across communities, to develop their leadership and skills and celebrate themselves and their communities. This work is often complex and non-linear, and the way which Esmée funds organisations to be responsive and adapt as they go.
Organisations use a range of language to articulate their practice. This reflects a wide range of methods and approaches, and different philosophical and disciplinary backgrounds to practice which sits under the community-led art and creativity umbrella. Some lean into language specific to the arts, or particular artforms, and others deliberately avoid it and seek language –and practices – rooted in areas like community development.
Whilst these practices are not new, in the period since 2000 there is evidence of some organisations exploring and developing methodologies like legislative theatre, and other approaches to support communities to engage in democratic processes and other kinds of community development and decision-making. Some practices are also developing to ensure that care and/ or trauma-informed approaches are more integral.
Community-led art and creativity does not focus on outputs, or a straight route to a particular set of outcomes. Instead, experimentation and flexibility are essential in responding to the community, in relationships with stakeholders, and for creative satisfaction. This experimentation reflects how community members are involved in decisionmaking, as well as the types of activity. Practitioners want to work in a way which is about depth, rather than breath: prioritising the quality of relationships and engagement over quantity of delivery. This is also not new to community-led practice, but there is some evidence that some funders are getting better at recognising the importance of process rather than outputs.
Many organisations focus on and are based in a geographical area, and are committed to remaining in that place over the long term, building relationships and trust with communities. Doing so means networking extensively with individuals and other stakeholder organisations within the ecology of that community, and spending time listening, and being a visible presence. Organisations also operate within a sectoral ecology, and many are delivering work in partnership with other arts and cultural organisations. These partnerships bring different practices, skills and capacity to the delivery of work, and enable smaller organisations to extend their practice without having to grow their organisation.
The relationship between smaller companies solely focused on this work, and larger organisations which have a community engagement ‘arm’ is sometimes uneasy. Smaller organisations often feel they have led this practice, and
that it is being co-opted by presenting organisations which may be using language like ‘co-creation’ but applying more traditional consultation models.
The language and the rhetoric are used but the practices remain those of the institution who retains the power.’
Some feel larger organisations are engaging in this work to meet funders’ expectations, rather than from a strong sense of direct purpose. There is evidence in recent years, though, of larger organisations working with smaller, specialist organisations to deliver community-led art and creativity, and of these partnerships feeling meaningful to both parties.
Most organisations are reliant on a network of freelance creative practitioners who can be brought in for specific projects. There is evidence that some roles within the sector are beginning to change and expand as the practice develops. Reflecting the relatively small size of organisations in the sector, there is a crucial role played by individual practitioners in leading and shaping practice, and in influencing other practitioners and organisations in developing their work.
The diversity, or otherwise, of the cultural workforce is an issue which pre-dates 2000; the wider context of the Covid-19 pandemic, and the Black Lives Matter movement, have, however, prompted some organisations to pause in order to reflect, take more radical action to alter organisational structures, and to plan for longer-term change to create opportunities for a wider range of people to be part of the workforce.
Increasingly organisations find that they may be working with community members who need different kinds of support. How activities are run is changing to factor in providing food and supporting transport needs. Community members are also arriving with other support and advice needs, including mental health challenges. Whilst activities focused on food can be a valuable way to bring communities together (and is often used as a way to celebrate different cultures), the need to feed communities because they are hungry, rather than because its an integral part of community sharing and celebration, has a practical effect on how activities can be run. It also alters the relationship between organisations/ practitioners and communities. Organisations identify challenges in ensuring that staff have the right skills and knowledge to address these issues, feel confident and comfortable to do so, and know how and when to signpost communities on to other support. For some organisations, they have
had to decide whether they can take on work which might require different kinds of skills from them, whether they feel safe to do so and feel they can keep communities safe and/ormeet those needs.
Organisations are finding it hard to recruit to what is becoming a more complex and nuanced set of roles. There are talented and skilled creative practitioners who are confident in delivering participatory arts activities, but fewer in the workforce have the experience to facilitate community-led project development and producing.
Skilled facilitators are needed to support communities to get to first base. Artists need support from good facilitators if they’re not good at it themselves. We have lost skilled people in this area –retirement, age – but the skills needed have changed a lot.’
Creatives working in community-led art and creativity will increasingly need to be able to demonstrate that they can work in these new ways, but training and professional development opportunities do not yet meet the need.
Career development is challenging in this fragile system, without clear progression routes. This is acutely true for practitioners with particular lived experience, with benefits systems making it very difficult for people to make the move from unpaid participant/volunteer to paid work, particularly for freelance/ short-term work opportunities. Low pay and limited progression opportunities make it difficult for practitioners to stay and build a career.
Some organisations are developing workforce opportunities from within the communities they are working with, and there is evidence of those who started in roles like community networking, then moving on into project management and producing. Facilitating this type of professional development is, however, time consuming for small organisations, and the pipeline for next stage opportunities is often unclear.
Leaders are also concerned about burnout, with the strain of doing more with less, and meeting the increasing levels of need and potential conflict in the community. Supporting the wellbeing of staff and freelancers is becoming a higher priority.
Funding constraints are now having an impact on the type of work which they can programme. Organisations which focused on spectacle, for example bringing large-scale and/or international touring work, into local communities, or on delivering co-created festivals and events, have sometimes found that project budgets are no longer available for this type of work. Instead, there is an increased focus on regular activity, consistently available to individuals and families throughout the year, such as weekly choir sessions, or after school creative clubs. This alters the type of practice, what kinds of practitioners are employed and also changes things for the community, who may value regular work but miss the opportunity for the spectacle and large-scale.
Organisations and practitioners want to know about and engage with new methods and practices (inside the UK and beyond), and to articulate their own approaches and to share that knowledge. Create Gloucestershire, for example, is creating resources describing the new models it has tested to grow communityowned arts and culture, with specific learning about how community funding pots and new roles operate when cultural practice is the starting point. Citizens in Power offer a range of online resources on citizen-led governance. Take A Part have produced a guide to commissioning for community capacity building. Restoke have published a resource/toolkit,‘Holding Lightly’, which sets out their methods. Common/ Wealth have recently published a book, ‘Do It Yourself: Making Political Theatre’. This work sits alongside evaluations, think pieces, reviews and other important articulations from the wider sector.5 There is exciting new practice and organisations are keen to share it within the sector, and beyond it. They also want to extend their own knowledge and thinking.
This work helps to formalise and validate a vibrant and complex area of practice. It may also help funders to better understand a practice in which the process is as important as the outcomes.
Organisations are exploring new types of job roles, in order to address more traditionally hierarchical ways of working that have helped to reinforce inequities. Some employ community networkers in their first roles in the sector; these members of staff are keen to develop their skills in facilitation, production and project management. The budget-driven shift away from large-scale community arts events towards more regular programming and smaller projects is creating opportunities for creative practitioners and community members to step up into management. Newer methodologies and types of practice are giving practitioners the opportunity to extend their skills and knowledge.
There is an appetite for practitioners and organisational leaders to share practice and learn from each other, and a disappointment that some networks across the sector appear to have weakened due to limited funding, organisational capacity and a general move away from in-person networking. There is also evidence of organisations moving from peer engagement to partnership working, and a greater desire to try new things out together, or combine skills and resources in order to create work which cannot be delivered by an individual organisation. Zoo Co, for example, has been working with Boundless to start a new Young Company for 16-21 year olds, building on their collective knowledge and skills; the organisation also worked with Improbable to co-produce ‘Perfect Show For Rachel’. In some cases, for example Create Gloucestershire’s work with the local Integrated Care Board and VCS sector colleagues, and No Fit State’s close relationships with local community groups and service providers, these partnerships are cross-sector.
5 For example, Chrissie Tiller’s ‘Power Up’ which is a thinkpiece reflecting on Creative People and Places programmes; François Matarasso’s blog on co-creation, and his work evaluating and distilling learning from the Traction project; and work by Battersea Arts Centre and Heart of Glass on co-creation
The impact of Esmée Fairbairn Foundation’s support on the organisations and practitioners which practice community-led art and creativity has been significant in the past five years. The stability it has provided for those who are funded and through a period of rapid change and uncertainty, has enabled organisations to continue to innovate and develop their practice, and adapt to meet the changing needs of their communities, in a sector where organisations are generally vulnerable and unstable.
Esmée’s flexible funding during the Covid pandemic had enabled some organisations to continue to operate, and to move funding earmarked for cancelled projects to support individual artists in their communities with commissions and residencies. This offered valued continuity which helped them to emerge with local networks still in place and new ideas in development.
With the blessing of Esmée, we started to say to artists who were not being furloughed, whose work had completely stopped, what can you do with this money?’
The security of funding from Esmée has enabled organisations to create new roles, move freelance staff into employment, and experiment with different approaches to developing job descriptions for community producers and networkers. This has enabled organisations like Take a Part to move
from a sole founder to a co-CEO model, bringing greater in-house capacity for everything from financial management to research and development, and supporting them to undertake significant board development. For organisations like Factory International, Esmée’s support has enabled the role of Neighbourhood Organisers to develop and grow, and the organisation to learn about how these roles work, what support they need, and what those workers who have come from the community could do next. Factory International have also experimented with offering one-off grants to partner organisations based on a negotiated contract for working together. They credit this model with creating more equitable relationships from which better partnership working has developed. This would not be possible with a project-by-project funding m
Esmée has also supported organisations undertaking workforce development to open up the sector to those with specific barriers to employment, such as Zoo Co’s support for d/Deaf, disabled and neurodivergent artists, and Arts and Homelessness International’s cultural leadership programme. Finally, some organisations have been able to focus on care as an essential component of their work, providing pastoral support to staff and practitioners, as well as communities.
Core, unrestricted funding enables organisations and individual members of staff to take the time they need to develop relationships across the community. Organisations have the creative freedom to respond to whatever emerges from their engagement with communities, with piloting and experimentation welcomed. Esmée’s focus on process over delivery of specific outputs is also supporting organisations to do ‘less but better’.
Organisations have capacity for networking, exploration and partnership development which can be open-ended, and as a result, the quality of practice is higher. For example, Esmée supports The Stove Network to create the What We Do Now network, which is sharing and developing creative place-making practice, Create Gloucestershire which is an infrastructure organisation bringing communities, artists and partners together across Gloucestershire to test new ways of building creative power, and Citizens in Power to develop a network of organisations exploring the use of citizen-led decision-making methodologies.
There is a wide spectrum of intended purposes and outcomes for communityled art and creativity, which spans from developing the creative agency and skills of communities, through culture as a route to outcomes like individual and collective wellbeing, to culture as a tool for enabling community decision-making and democratic agency. This spectrum includesthe following types of purpose and outcome.
• Developing practitioners and producers, including those emerging from underrepresented communities.
• Providing opportunities to communities with limited cultural provision.
• Enabling people to participate in the making of art, telling their own stories and sharing their experiences.
• Usi ng arts and culture to develop a sense of pride in their communities and celebrating and sharing positive narratives about disadvantaged places.
• Developing links between local communities and arts organisations, developing routes for the community to influence their programmes and delivery, or wider local cultural strategies.
• Making a difference to individuals and i mproving lives by providing people with new opportunities to develop skills and progress.
• Supporting people to improve their physical health and mental wellbeing.
• Creating safe spaces in which people with shared experience and characteristics can come together.
• Creating safe spaces in which people from different walks of life can come together, addressing community tensions and counteracting political division (whether directly or indirectly).
• Supporting children and families to engage in positive and joyful activities together.
Art and creativity as tool
• Using creative methods to connect communities, organisations and public services, creating more equitable power structures in local communities, and exploring new ways of managing decision-making, resources and budgets which place more power in the hands of the community.
• Encouraging and supporting people to take action on issues which matter to them, using creativity as an approach to making change.
• Improving the fabric of communities or making assets available to the community through environmental initiatives and the repurposing of buildings.
These are not new; community-led art and creativity has always had these multiple purposes. In the period since Esmée’s strategy was launched, however, individual organisations have shifted their priorities in response to community demand and need, and to reflect where funding and resources are.
The impact of Covid-19, the Black Lives Matter movement, political uncertainty and increased levels of poverty and need in communities mean that organisations have had to think hard about what communities need, and how organisations should respond. Some explored changes to leadership structures and decisionmaking, and for many this has prompted a reconsideration of how they relate to communities:
The pandemic, because we physically couldn’t do anything, was a very valuable breathing space to stop and reflect…coupled [with] Black Lives Matter, the murder of George Floyd, we really examined who we were working with, who we were inadvertently excluding, and how people were being excluded. We realised just how hierarchical and top-down all of our decision-making was. We realised how many sort of cultural assumptions were just embedded in the organisation that meant people from other backgrounds wouldn’t want to engage with us.’
I think the fundamental shift for us that came after Covid was this idea of moving away from Artistic Director led programming because it has shifted the entire organisation’s way of doing and thinking. It feels less about an artistic director’s ego and more about what does this place need and want, and how do we speak to the communities to ask them what they want.’
As a result of these broader events and changes, organisations are rethinking how they want to serve communities, broadening or narrowing their focus, or extending their work into new areas of purpose and outcomes, depending on where their strengths and practices lie.
People’s behaviour since the Covid-19 pandemic has changed:
People have got out of the habit of doing things.’
The Covid response brought some people and organisations together to take action to support each other in new ways, but for many individuals it has led to isolation and reduced activity. The profound impacts on young people are still being understood. Finding new ways to reach people, bring people together and form groups is becoming a more important part of community-led art and creativity.
The limited capacity of the wider infrastructure around communities is discussed further in funding and resources, but the capacity at community level, particularly from volunteer-run community groups, has been severely affected. Networking at the community level can rely on overstretched volunteers in other grassroots organisations. Some organisations find
their efforts to network or work with new audiences in the community are not always welcomed; it takes time to overcome negativity and build trust.
Achieving community involvement and engagement, and progressing to things like local decision-making, is a slow process. Those with models like paid community networkers report that it takes years, rather than months, for these new roles to be able to make things happen: building the groundwork cannot be rushed. Funding practices are often a barrier to this kind of work.
Community capacity also affects organisations exploring models of community governance and input for their own operations: organisations want a more engaged and involved membership or involvement from the community, but it's difficult to find people who were ready and willing to take on the responsibility.
For some organisations it is challenging to hold fast to their own sense of purpose, when community need has expanded or changed and the wider system seems to be failing communities. Organisations are cautious about stepping into space which they feel should be the responsibility of other providers, or where they lack the skills or experience which is required. Setting boundaries and defining what work they are or are not prepared to do is challenging, as they want to respond to local needs and are navigating relationships with stakeholders including members of the community. Organisations are also sometimes navigating the tension between their own creative aspirations and the preferences of the community.
While the tension in many communities is challenging, organisations are creating programmes where different people can come together in an atmosphere of creativity and joy. These activities help to tackle the social isolation which organisations felt was driving people towards a more extreme politics. The increasing need for the kind of work they do best – bringing people together, creative problem solving, and encouraging people to communicate –is an opportunity to demonstrate the increasing relevance of community-led art and creativity to policy makers.
Whilst there is evidence (discussed further in practice, practitioners and organisations) that organisations are finding it hard to negotiate between community needs and their own capacities and skillsets, they are also motivated to develop their practice to meet the needs which they see in communities. This is challenging, not least because the external context changes:
…those risk factors or those exclusion factors or those world events or even smaller political changes have meant that we have to keep redefining what we mean by a safe place and what factors do we need to consider when we think about where we put something, and how do we look after those audiences that come into those spaces.’
Organisations are responding by taking on new understanding and practices, e.g. exploring things like trauma-informed approaches and deradicalisation practices, and reflecting on the purpose and outcomes they want to achieve with communities.
Organisations were confident in their value to their communities in the context of increased political unrest and tension, and declining trust in government. In particular, some organisations talked about their ability to understand how young people are differently affected by political, social and economic change, with different conflict points and pressures than those experienced by other generations.
There is expertise in building trust and dealing with intra-community conflict within the funded cohort, for example in Northern Ireland, which could be more widely shared. There is also potentially a great deal to learn from practice outside the UK in relation to how arts organisations can address conflict.
Organisations are developing new models and approaches to embed members of the community in organisational governance and decisionmaking, and building progression routes so that future organisational (or other) leadership might come from within the community. They are also doing work which builds community leadership for things that communities might want to do, including developing their own organisations and activities, or taking on spaces or other resources. This work takes time, and is not without challenges; but it is a crucial opportunity to develop the capacity of individuals and the wider community, and to build community agency into organisations and other structures.
We have already discussed how Esmée’s support has helped organisations to have the time to develop their thinking about practice and try new things with less pressure for results, with a focus on process rather than outputs. Similarly, Esmée’s longer-term funding support is enabling organisations to think about their purpose, to take time to consider what is needed from them in this moment, and to experiment with changes to their structures, plans and activities which move them in a new direction.
There are many examples across the programme of inspiring, joyful and creative cultural programming in communities across the UK which have resulted from Esmée’s support, such as East Marsh United’s Glastonbabies family music festival, Heart of Glass’s Posh Club LGBTQ+ run tea dance for over 60s in St Helens, and Zoo Co’s work with residents in care homes, its youth company and other activities which particularly celebrates the creativity of d/Deaf, disabled and neurodivergent practitioners and communities. These programmes are making a positive difference in the lives
of individuals, their families and carers and wider communities.
Esmée’s openness to organisations changing and learning as they go is very much valued by funded organisations in this context. There is less pressure on them to have a fixed set of aims. Organisations valued the way in which Esmée funding enabled work which gives them a distinct purpose and value in communities which have experienced a series of shocks, including the pandemic, the loss of key facilities, and social unrest.
The stability and flexibility provided by Esmée’s support is enabling organisations to deliver work which focuses on tackling challenging tensions and issues in their local communities, knowing that they are there for the long term rather than parachuting in with a short-term project. Féile an Phobail in Belfast, emerged as a response to conflict in the North of Ireland and brings communities together around a series of celebratory events.. Other organisations discussed their work in the context of overcoming new community tensions related to the farright.
Esmée have also supported work to develop a variety of different models for community governance, despite the untested nature of much of this and the risks involved. Organisations like Trinity Community Arts and The Stove Network are exploring how membership models enable community agency in their organisations. These models are in their early stages, and there is still much to learn. The next step is to move the practice forward, helping organisations to address some of the issues which are barriers to participation, and ensuring that learning is shared.
This work on developing community agency, supported by Esmée, also extends beyond organisations. Heart of Glass is supporting communities to contribute to the development of place-based regeneration (an area of community-led art and creativity discussed further in policy and politics) and No Fit State and East Marsh United are supporting communities to take action to make parks and streets safer.
Esmée’s strategy for Community-led art and creativity was developed in 2020; already at this point direct funding for art and creativity had seen substantial cuts, at national levels6 and through local authorities7 . Whilst the pace of direct cuts from central government has slowed, funding has not recovered in the period since 2020. Whilst cuts have been a factor across all four nations in the UK, funding for art and creativity in Northern Ireland has also been impacted by the fragility of the Assembly and uncertainty over funding year to year.
The impact on local government, particularly in England, has worsened as other service areas like social care take up a greater proportion of council budgets 8 , and more drastic measures, such as granting emergency funding powers9 to 16% of councils. The overall resilience of local authorities is at stake, and the impact on funding for art and creativity has been significant, with major cities like Birmingham cutting whole grants to local cultural organisations. Crucially, what organisations are noticing is a decline in mainstream funding and resources; this is sometimes juxtaposed with funding which still exists but for very specific areas (e.g. arts and health) and creates a challenging funding landscape.
Other funding sources are also under pressure: the proportion of people donating to charities has been in steady decline since 201610 , and trusts and foundations reporting unprecedented application levels.
6 For example, in 2010 Arts Council England received an in-year cut of 4%, followed by a cut of 32% in real terms over the four years; and a 5% real terms cut for 2015/16, followed by a 1% real terms cut the following year (Arts Council England, no date). Welsh Government funding for culture and sport declined in real terms by 17% between 2014-15 and 2024-25 (Welsh Parliament, 2025). Funding for the arts through Arts Council Northern Ireland peaked in 2011/12 (Smyth, 2025).
7 For example, funding from central government to local government also declined; in England, Spending Reviews in 2010 and subsequently planned for cuts of 37% by 2015/16, excluding Better Care Fund and public health grant (Harvey, 2016). Evidence shows that these cuts have affected funding for art and creativity, and that they have fallen unevenly with cuts which range from 1% to 94%, with activities like ‘arts development and support’ being particularly affected (Rex and Campbell, 2022).
8 Social care as a proportion of service spend has risen from 55% in 2010-11 to 66% in 2023/24; comparatively, spend on culture and leisure has decreased from 7.4% to 4.5% over the same period (Local Government Association).
9 Emergency funding power give permission for councils to sell asset, such as publicly owned libraries and leisure centres, and borrow in order to meet their day-to-day budget responsibilities.
10 From 61% of people in 2016 donating to charity, to 50% of people in 2024 (Charities Aid Foundation).
Other parts of the infrastructure which community-led art and creativity relies on or works with are also feeling the effects of the decline in government investment and rise in costs. Public services, including health, education and libraries, and voluntary and community organisations and groups like youth clubs have all been significantly affected. Other parts of the infrastructure, such as venues for touring work, are also under pressure. Typically, organisations found that earned income from ticket sales/audiences was almost impossible to generate in a meaningful way (with the exception of organisations which owned buildings where other kinds of work was presented).
During the Covid pandemic there is some evidence of valuable partnership working between the third sector (including art and creativity-led organisations) and the public sector, and funding being devolved more easily between different parts of local, regional
and national infrastructure. Despite this, post-pandemic increased costs and a reversion to pre-Covid ways of working have, in many cases, not only limited this kind of partnership working; they have also limited the capacity of staff and organisations to engage in this kind of work in the future.
There are other ways in which wider funding patterns affect those working in community-led art and creativity. The proposed cuts to support for disabled people by the UK Government in 2025 were narrowly avoided in the second reading of the Universal Credit Act; changes to welfare can significantly affect the ability of different groups in society to engage with, and lead in, community-led art and creativity. Combined with the effects of austerity, cost of living crisis and inflationary pressures on households and communities, these material conditions affect not only who can be part of this work, but why it is needed and how it can happen.
As noted in the context section, both direct and indirect funding has declined, and the competition for funding has risen significantly. The level of competition, with so many applications might be made and so few go forward to be funded, was viewed by many funded organisations as an indication of systemic failure: not only that the level of funding and resource does not reflect the need and ambition of this work, but also that this kind of competition means that organisations pull back from collaboration and more open sharing.
Many organisations report that there are still funders who expect a lot of activity/return for small amounts of money, and/or to create significant impact over short periods of time. More generally, there is still a funding culture which wants to fund ‘new’ things, seeks guaranteed outcomes, does not place faith in organisations and their practice, and is quite intolerant of risk (seeking to eradicate it through things like standardised application and monitoring processes):
You know, it’s becoming harder to sustain practice, a lot of the work that we do…is project based, because that’s where money is, because, again, funders want you to do a thing they can tell people that you’ve done, rather than funding the systems themselves and the organisations and really trusting them to know what the work is.’
This sort of what feels like an obsession with, oh, what’s your project? What it what’s the new thing you’re doing? And we’re sort of, well, our project is working in communities over decades and we’re already doing it…’
For organisations, the impact of this culture is that it is difficult for organisations to get beyond projectby-project planning and budgeting and hard to develop and sustain practice. This is particularly challenging for more community-based organisations, and those without the size or scale to access things like in-house fundraising expertise. For communities, the impact is that this kind of funding promotes short-term work and relationships, erodes or
prevents the development of trust (upon which this work depends), and cannot address the longer-term ambitions and challenges which communities may have.
Given all of these challenges, despite the fact that organisations supported by Esmée are by definition more stable than most, leaders still feel that their organisations are fragile and at risk. There is little sense of long-term stability in the sector.
The other significant element of this funding culture is that it limits the strategic capacity of organisations, and reflects the absence of strategic connections between funders. Organisations find it difficult not only to sustain their practice (and maintain key resources, such as staff and their creative practitioners), but to push the boundaries of their work. Other elements of strategic development, such as research or sharing practice with others, is also limited by these funding approaches.
Funded organisations are not confident that funders work strategically or engage well with each other. They do not feel that funders share learning from funding programmes well, or take significant notice of learning from other funders’ programmes. There are exceptions to this, but on the whole funded organisations report a messy, often overlapping but not complementary funding landscape.
As noted above, the pressure on different parts of the wider infrastructure means that fewer activities which might underpin art and creativity are taking place and a decline in available resources like space. It also means that relationships, partnership working and shared understanding decline too. There are parts of the infrastructure where there may be a willingness to partner, but funding or resources are lacking, or the mechanisms to devolve funding or resources are too restrictive. The support structures which might help individuals and communities with a wide range of things in their lives are also fragile and depleted: funded organisations report feeling that they are sometimes being asked to step in where front-line services used to be, or finding that there is nowhere to refer community members to when they need more support.
Organisations draw their funding from a range of sources, including arts councils, government agencies, public sector organisations and frameworks, national lottery funds and a range of other trusts and foundations.
The emphasis on ‘place-based’ and ‘place-making’ work, and the prospects of additional funding, or different kinds of funding approaches, being available as a result of devolution (national or regional), or via opportunities like City of Culture and Town of Culture, is one area in which funded organisations see potential for growth and/or better funding practices. Some of the more innovative funding approaches discussed above are already placefocused, and sometimes involve funding multiple projects or partners across a single area in order to support the wider ecology, rather than only a single intervention. The focus on place also provides clearer rationales for potential funders to work together, and for organisations and parts of the infrastructure to engage in partnership working.
There is evidence of funders exploring new ways to fund which are particularly relevant to this area, for example: Local
Trust in England, which focuses on place-based funding and (through the Big Local11 partnerships) placed long-term funding with local communities; and the Creative Communities programme by Inspiring Scotland12 , which funds community-led work. Key to these approaches is the role of the community in receiving funding and making decisions about how it is used. Some Esmée funded organisations have experience of this kind of funding approach, and have found the funding relationships valuable.
The other area in which some funders are changing their practice is a move towards longer-term funding, including the National Lottery Community Fund typically offering funding for projects running up to 5 years, and some funders exploring investments of up to 10 years. Where this is supported by grants being unrestricted, and by other kinds of flexibility, this approach to funding is seen as having the potential to be transformational. Funded organisations feel this reflects a better understanding of the time required to build meaningful relationships, and enable communities to develop capacity and agency.
Funded organisations have taken on buildings which previously had value and importance to communities; while running a building can challenge the financial models and staff capacity of organisations, it can also return that asset to the community, providing space to come together, and for experimentation. Creating innovative uses for underused and derelict buildings is enabling organisations to drive visible improvement in their communities, and placing them as stakeholders within wider networks as seen at Nudge Community Builders and intoBodmin. Some organisations also play a role in facilitating other community-led groups/organisations to take on buildings.
11 Big Local is funded by the National Lottery Community Fund.
12 A venture philanthropy model, which raises money from a range of sources including individual donors, trusts and foundation and Scottish Government.
Esmée offers unrestricted funding, typically for 3-4 years, and often invites funded organisations to consider applying for one or more subsequent rounds of funding. This funding plays a critical role in building the capacity of small organisations, enabling them to develop and sustain their practice, growth and scale-up their work, and mature their operations. Ultimately this helps them to deliver meaningful work with communities, building trust and understanding.
…the idea that when you’re writing a budget for a year ahead, you can put in money that you know is coming in is an extraordinary thing to be able to do. And it allows you to plan. It allows you to offer freelance contracts that you wouldn’t otherwise be able to offer, or a fixed term employee…’
This kind of funding alters the planning horizons and ambitions of organisations, and changes the way they are able to do their work. For organisations like Restoke, Zoo Co and intoBodmin, which became a National Portfolio Organisation (NPO) with Arts Council England just prior to applying for Esmée funding, the unrestricted support from Esmée sits alongside that NPO funding to enable the organisation to do things it could not do when it was working project-to-project.
It also enables them to gain other kinds of funding, or comes alongside other kinds of funding. Esmée funding is seen as helping organisations look credible, validating their practice and enabling them to make the case to other funders and potential partners for the quality and impact of the work they do.
Feedback on how stakeholders have found working with Esmée, and their views on funding processes, and the areas in which they feel Esmée could add the most value to their work. This feedback reflects the views of successful applicants for Esmée support. Stakeholders were almost universally positive: Esmée is seen as a stalwart of community-led art and creativity funding. It might be valuable to consider what views unsuccessful applicants might have about processes and feedback.
Interviewees highlighted the importance of Esmée as a source of funding for community-led art and creativity programmes. There are a limited number of alternative sources of funding out there, and those which are available are often restricted in some way. The availability of longterm funding which can be used flexibly and support core costs is critical to organisations, and it enables the experimentation, and slower and more strategic development of approaches to practice which is currently happening in Esmée funded organisations. This makes Esmée an important supporter and ally for the community arts sector.
Application processes are rigorous, but some organisations felt that the process was valuable to them – they were able to think about strategy, Esmée’s suggestions were taken on board and their plans were considered thoughtfully and practically (examples of them offering higher amounts, or spreading funding over a longer timeframe because they felt it was needed). The application process felt more like a dialogue and negotiation.
We found that they were also the first funder ever to come back and offer us more money. So…where we’ve come from, we never asked for enough and we massively undervalue what we do. And they came back and they were like, we think you need more….they really looked at us…in a way that you can’t look at yourself almost.’
One interviewee talked about how the process of creating a new business plan to support their application to Esmée had been a significant development, helping them to pivot from a capital project to refurbish a building to a programme-focused organisation.
The flexibility to report either with Esmée’s own reporting template or by submitting reports produced for other funders was appreciated. Those with experience of producing monitoring and evaluation reports for other funders highlighted the extended amount of time this takes. The flexibility of reporting requirements also enabled them to play to their creative strengths, using storytelling and art to demonstrate their impact.
Interviewees valued the personal connections they had with the Esmée staff team. The team demonstrates a genuine interest in the work they do and what they are learning, an element which was sometimes lacking from their more transactional relationships with other funders. Esmée believes in the arts, and understands the value of fun, creative and joyful interventions in communities.
I think the last conversation we had…actually felt really like a creative discussion between our hopes and aspirations and what they might like to see. And it really felt like peers working together, not an organisation and a funding body. And that’s very rare.’
Funded organisations had a strong sense that Esmée as a funder shared their values, and that as a result if Esmée were confident that you were working in accordance with those values, they would be flexible about what and how work was delivered. This enables organisations to experiment, to pivot in response to community need, and to stop doing things if they weren’t working. Some would have welcomed the opportunity to open discussions about follow-on funding earlier in their grant funded period.
While some organisations appreciated being left to get on with their work, and felt that this demonstrated trust, others appreciated Esmée’s willingness to visit them and to understand their work within its local context.
They don’t micromanage, they don’t interfere. They’re not bothering you all the time, not making you go to silly meetings, not making you dance on a hot tin can and prove yourself. I think they see that the proof is in the work and they’re seeing the work.’
One relatively recently funded organisation felt that they would have liked more contact over the first year of funding while the relationship was being established.
Those organisations which had received additional Funding Plus support to work with consultants had a more mixed experience. While some had found this to be valuable and even transformational, others struggled to find the time and capacity to be good clients to their consultants and take full advantage of the opportunity. Crucial was the capacity to be able to action any plans developed through the Funding Plus support.
A more flexible approach to spending funding on organisational development may be more helpful, allowing organisations not only to spend money on external consultants, but also to be able to spend the money on internal capacity or other forms of professional development or research and development.
what funders like Esmée have is the kind of power of gathering and connecting. And I think what we felt like a few years ago, we were part of some brilliant national networks that have all kind of fallen away, because basically no one’s got the money to hold and convene national networks…
I feel like we’ve gone back into a bit of a silo...’
A key challenge for many of the funded organisations and individual practitioners is how they connect and share practice with others in the sectors. Some noted that there had been networking opportunities, such as the Co-Creating Change Network (funded by Esmée, Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation UK, and Arts Council England) which were available as open opportunities to organisations undertaking this kind of work. Organisations want to connect and engage with peers, learn from each other, and contribute to vibrant discussions and understanding of the practice.
Whilst organisations are keen to network and share practice, time capacity and the cost of being involved are factors in their decisions to engage or not with peer engagement opportunities.
Across Esmée’s portfolio it currently funds a range of network and partnership working activities, which does include one open network which has a range of local ‘chapters’ across England and Wales. Other networks supported by Esmée focus on specific geographical areas, types of practice, or sharing the learning from specific projects or activities. These are valuable routes to peer engagement and sharing practice, but they are not available to all organisations undertaking community-led art and creativity. Stakeholders who were able to be involved in Esmée’s recent sharing day in Birmingham found it very valuable, and there is appetite for similar events.
Some stakeholders would also like to see more opportunities for research into community-led art and creativity, both to widen and explore the range of practice (including outside the UK) and to continue to articulate the practice and its value. The role of evaluation and learning from projects still concerns funded organisations, who often feel that they have limited space for reflection, and that the learning they have could be more widely shared. There is still very limited support available from the funding landscape for research and travel, and for continuous professional development for those working in this area.
Stakeholders still feel that there is a job to do to explain the value of this practice, and what good practice really looks like, to a wider audience of policymakers, funders and potential partners. Esmée is particularly well-positioned to do so, and gathers significant intelligence on the practice, and the challenges and impacts of doing this work. Esmée could consider taking a more active role in sharing what it learns from the organisations and activities which it funds, and in considering how it might share that knowledge – with peer funders and others – at tables where funded organisations are unlikely to have a seat.
views on how Esmée could add value in the future
Esmée is a funder which is, typically, more supportive than many others of work which crosses over multiple areas, such as arts, community development, environment and sustainability, etc. Some organisations feel that they are working across Esmée’s funding priorities, rather than just in one area, and they would like the opportunity to demonstrate this crossover within their application.
Stakeholders feel that the funding landscape is quite messy and challenging to navigate; despite this, there are funders with similar aims. Often, they sit side by side because organisations bid to them to fund programmes of work, but there is no active collaboration. More generally, there is a view that funders don’t learn from each other as actively as they could. Organisations would be interested to see how Esmée might collaborate with other funders to create more strategic opportunities, particularly in new or risky areas of practice, or areas in which a longer-term commitment might have significant impact.
Organisations also find that the current funding environment does not encourage them to collaborate with each other. It also limits the kinds of partnerships they can build across sectors. Esmée could consider how it might take a role in supporting collaboration and partnership, whether through connecting organisations with similar practice in different parts of the UK, or supporting shared work across sectors and systems.
Several stakeholders noted that some other funders of community-led work are exploring longer term funding. This includes moves to five-year funding, or up to five-year funding, and, more occasionally, 10-year funding (usually following a period of development or initial shorter phase). This kind of funding term is felt to reflect a proper understanding of how long it takes to undertake meaningful work with communities, and particularly to build community capacity and trust.
Trust communities Esmée should continue to fund work which uses different models, and sometimes new approaches, to build community capacity and enable agency. This might include community governance models for organisations and programmes, and juries and assemblies for routes into policymaking. They should also continue to learn from any other funders who seek to place resources directly with communities rather than with organisations working within them, about how to understand what the opportunities and challenges might be of direct funding.
The review employed two key approaches. We reviewed a range of existing documents and data held by Esmée, including funding reports and awards data, and reading a range of sector reports, policy, funding data and other material. We heard from a range of stakeholders, including: members of the Esmée team (via a scoping workshop and interviews); 6 wider stakeholders in the communityled art and creativity sector via interviews; and 21 organisations currently funded by Esmée under the community-led art and creativity priority (via interviews and a validation workshop).
This report reflects the views and experiences of the people we interviewed and is supported by progress reports and the views of Esmée staff. It is, therefore, a reflection of this qualitative data, rather than a comprehensive or quantitative assessment of context and impact.
The review has benefited significantly from the input and sharing of the team at Esmée, those wider stakeholders and funded organisations. It is limited partly by the timescale for the work itself, which – for example – has made it harder to seek involvement from communities or freelance artists in interviews. In addition, the length of this report means that there is a wealth of rich qualitative material which is largely summarised here.
If, in the future, Esmée is considering similar work in order to reflect on its impact in this area, and changing contexts, we would strongly advocate for a more expansive timescale, and capacity to seek more involvement directly from some of those key constituents who are deeply involved in this work.
Arts Council England
Arts & Homelessness
International
Back to Ours Arts Limited
Citizens In Power
Common/Wealth
Create Gloucestershire
Dr Chrissie Tiller
East Marsh United
Esmée Fairbairn Foundation
Factory International
Féile an Phobail
François Matarasso
Heart of Glass
Inspiring Scotland
intoBodmin CIC
Manchester City Council
Museums Association
NoFit State Community Circus
Nudge Community Builders
Restoke
Sistema Scotland
Strike a Light
Take A Part CIO
Talking Birds
The Stove Network
Trinity Community Arts
Zoo Co
1. Can you tell me about your or ganisation, and what kind of community-led practice you engage in?
2. Has the kind of community-led work that you do changed in the last few years? If it has, can you tell me why you think that is?
3. Do you think the communityled work that you do is likely to change in the future? What is new, or different, about your practice or that of other organisations at the moment?
4. Tell me about the support you h ave had from Esmée Fairbairn Foundation, and the activities that you undertook or are undertaking?
5. Wh at was/has been so far the impact of/value of the support from Esmée Fairbairn Foundation?
6. Wh at have you taken forward/ do you plan to take forward from these activities?
7. Why is community-led arts and creativity important now?
8. Wh at are the current barriers or opportunities to communityled arts and creativity?
9. Wh at is required to create more, or better, opportunities for community-led art and creativity?
10. In your opinion, what kind of i mpact has Esmée Fairbairn Foundation had on communityled art and creativity in the last few years?
11. Where could Esmée Fairbairn Foundation add the most value to this area of work in the future?
12. Is there anything else you would like to tell me?
Esmée Fairbairn Foundation
210 Pentonville Rd
London N1 9JY
020 7812 3700 info@Esméefairbairn.org.uk @EsmeeFairbairn www.esmeefairbairn.org.uk
Registered charity 200051
Front cover: Restoke – The Lotus Eaters, Feb 2023. © Jenny Harper
Page 5: Trinity Community Arts –Our Freedom Dance Performance. © Leticia Valverdes
Page 8: IntoBodmin – Woodland Wonder Sept 2025. © Duffy Shoots
Page 9: Factory International –NO – Festival Square. © Manchester International Festival
Page 10: Trinity Community Arts –Community Day Celebration, Speak Out Performance 2025. © Irenehace fotos
Page 12: Talking Birds – Green Ways. © Andrew Moore
Page 14: Take a Part – Community celebration event, 2011. © Keith Harrison
Page 16: The Stove Network –WWDN LABS2. © AndyJardine
Page 17: Trinity Community Arts –Artist and Facilitators for OFTN in front of outdoor exhibition. © Sham Ahmed
Page 21: Create Gloucestershire –Sadegh, Elisha and Pippa during National Gallery Road Trip. © GAWP 24 Kazz Hollick
Page 22: Take a Part – Green Orchestra, 2016. © Dom Moore Photography
Page 24: Restoke – The Lotus Eaters rehearsal, Jan 2023. © Jenny Harper
Page 25: The Stove Network – WWDN Mountainhall Greenspace. © EmilyTough
Page 26: Citizens in Power – citizens for culture event. © Ciara Hillyer
Page 29: Create Gloucestershire –National Gallery Road. © The Venture Community Hub
Page 31: East Marsh United –
Blue Monday Residents Party 2. © East Marsh United
Page 32: Take a Part – Travelling Museum of Communities 2022.
© Dom Moore Photography
Design: Steers McGillan Eves
Page 20: Citizens in Power –Network group photo. © James Allan
Page 33: Common/Wealth – Beyond the Impossible with Bianca on the mic. © Jon Pountney
Page 34: East Marsh United –Talking Tuesdays. © East Marsh United
Page 35: Restoke – The Lotus Eaters, Feb 2023. © Jenny Harper
Page 36: Talking Birds – Citizens Assembly. © Janet Vaughan
Page 37: IntoBodmin – Open Circle Feb 2026. © intoBodmin
Page 38: Common/Wealth – We Stand With You exhibition. © Jon Pountney
Page 37: IntoBodmin – Shadow Lounge Feb 2026.© Emma Macdonald
Page 41: Trinity Community Arts –Our Freedom workshops. © Jon Aitken
Page 42: Factory International –Joy on the square – CPP. © Manchester International Festival
Page 43: Restoke – The Power Project, Jul 2024. © JennyHarper
Page 44: Common/Wealth – Workshop with Evie facilitating. © Jon Pountney