The Garfield Weston Foundation has awarded grants to over one hundred arts organisations, with a combined total of more than £30 million being distributed across a diverse array of projects.
The Weston Culture Fund has been created to help support the arts following the devastating impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, by providing grants ranging from £100,000 to £1.5 million.
The fund is supporting a range of organisations, including ballet companies, regional theatres and museums. The National Theatre, Northern Ballet and the NoFit State Circus are among the organisations who have been awarded grants.
Northern Ballet’s Chief Executive, Mark Skipper, said “we are incredibly grateful to the Weston Culture Fund for awarding us this game-changing grant and for their continued confidence in the excellence of our performances on stage and screen.”
Skipper added that the grant will allow Northern Ballet “to reach significantly more audiences so that we may continue to break down barriers to dance and ensure ballet is accessible to everyone, everywhere.”
Garfield Weston Foundation director, Philippa Charles, emphasised the significance of the arts to local communities and expressed the importance of the grants in helping the sector to recover. She said “our time away from the arts has shown just how important they are to us – bringing much needed pleasure and enrichment to our lives. Arts organisations are desperate to reopen and get back to what they do best, and we hope that this new funding will help many of them do exactly that.”
Words by Charlotte Roszko.
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