PAB- Sources of Funding

27/11/15- Sources of Funding
I started to research sources of funding for arts events like my own theatre tour and found a number of public and private sources of funding:

Arts Council England gives funding to many arts events across the country and  invest money from Government and the National Lottery to support arts and culture across England. They are a public source of funding as they use money given by the government. If able to get funding from the Arts Council it can give a large amount of money to projects. Though with many other projects up for funding as well it can be hard to gain such funding and can take time to process and get the actual money so may not be best for projects in the very near future.

The Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation UK is a charitable organisation that can provide private funding to deliver social, cultural and environmental value through projects. They occasionally fund start-up organisations, like a theatre company for example. They do have a strong focus on widening participation in performing arts practice and what to help nurture originality in the field. They fund many other things as well as the performing arts so trying to get funding may be difficult. Also money given by private funding tends to be less than public funding but for a small start up theatre company it would likely be more than enough. The time it would take to get the funding would likely be relatively quick compared to public funding so might be better for an event planned in the nearer future.  

Arts in Business is a charity that helps give arts organisations in England extra funding by matching the amount of money that has been gained through other funding or raised if they meet their eligibility criteria. This can be a great way to gain additional funding and also gain business help, advise and use of social media. They also help to bring arts businesses together to help everyone and mutually benefit each other. Though of course to gain funding the organisation must meet the eligibility criteria and even then may not be given funding but being a private source of funding it would  likely be quicker process involving less bureaucracy and so funding may be able to be acquired quicker. 

Lottery funding is also a good way of gaining funding for a performing arts project as they often give money to events and organisation to better communities, like through theatre. It can be helpful especially for a smaller project (like the theatre tours) as they give grants starting from £300 to more than £500,000 so they can give smaller funding as well. As its public funding the process can be slow as lots of paperwork and such tends to be done but its often worth it for the amount of money available. Also Lottery funding can only be used for the arts at specific times as they have different 'pots of money' that are available at different times, as at one point they might be focusing funding on other things so there would be no available funding for my project or any other performing arts project. For example at the time of writing this it would be hard to gain funding through the Lottery as there are no specific pots available for the arts or performance. 

Though of course for a small project like this small scale theatre tour funding may be able to be found just through self fundraising but for larger projects and theatre tours funding methods like these above are extremely important in the arts.