We're excited to share that we will open to applications for Youth-Led Creativity in July. Co-designed with Esmée's Involving Young People Collective, the programme will focus on work in Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland, and accept applications on a rolling basis.
The Youth-Led Creativity programme builds on young people's power to make change, using creativity to enhance their lives, develop their careers, and influence the world around them. We will be focusing our support on arts and culture organisations based and working in Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland; and where the work is led by, and for, young people underrepresented in arts and culture.
Together with the Involving Young People Collective (IYPC), we are finalising the details and will share more information when we launch, which we hope to do in early July. However, we expect to make 12 to 16 grants over the next two years. We will be hosting a Q&A webinar on 16 July, which you can register for below.
The programme takes on board learning from the 2024 iteration of the Fund – including feedback from the 10 organisations funded and feedback from applicants. We’ve also taken some time to think more deeply about what the vision for Youth-Led Creativity is.
Co-designing the Youth-Led Creativity programme
In the video below, Louise Chandler, Daniel Mapatac and Aaliyah McLaughlin, young consultants from the IYPC, share more about the co-design process including the decision to focus on work in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.
Grants extended for organisations funded in 2024
We are also offering an additional year’s funding to the ten organisations we supported in 2024 with three-year grants. Feedback from the learning programme shows the power of allowing adequate time to build meaningful relationships between organisations that have not worked together before.
We now have several exciting, collaborative learning projects happening in the cohort and hope that, by extending these grants to four years, we can maximise these opportunities, and share this learning with the organisations we fund in the next phase.
