Eight arts projects are to receive a total of £8.6m from the Treasurys Invest to Save Budget, which encourages joined-up working by funding innovative projects that bring together organisations in partnership to deliver more efficient and effective public services. A range of projects have been given major cash awards, all with a view to improving working practices in various parts of the arts sector.
The Jerwood Charitys Mission, Models, Money project receives a cash boost to address the challenges faced by individual arts and cultural organisations and their funders in developing businesses that are both mission-led and financially sustainable. The use of the arts to promote health is addressed by other projects. Sefton Councils proposal, Creative Alternatives, will develop an arts on prescription referral scheme for people suffering from stress and depression; and the Isle of Wight Healthcare NHS and Primary Care Trust will receive £875,000 to evaluate the use of arts programmes with three key health groups: obese and overweight children aged 57 years, adults aged 1865 with mental health needs, and stroke survivors and their carers aged over 55. The project will compare the cost-benefits and effectiveness of arts treatments with drugs, sessions with medical practitioners, and public health and social services, and develop new models for public service partnerships and health service referrals onto arts programmes. Other beneficiaries include VocalEyes and STAGETEXT which have won a joint award of over £1m to extend access to the theatre for blind, partially-sighted, deaf, deafened and hard of hearing people. The project will result in an expansion of audio description and captioning, with groups of theatres and venues being invited to form local hubs to share equipment, training and marketing and to collaborate in making their work fully accessible.
Another focus of the awards is on the arts in community development. In Swindon, an action research project will put arts investment at the start of a new education facility linked to the growth of a large urban housing development; and another project led by Culture East Midlands will create and test a toolkit for cultural and spatial planning which can be used by local authorities to help them build cultural facilities and opportunities into community planning at an early stage. The largest award of all, £1.8m, will be used to bring together a range of arts organisations of varying sizes to work with the local authorities in the Boroughs of Lambeth and Southwark to enable young people to take part in cultural activity; and in Somerset, a £500,000 project by Sound Sense will aim to improve the delivery of music education services to young people by improving collaboration between music support agencies and providers. A further £1.75m is earmarked for an online learning consortium comprising ten national museums and galleries, to encourage better use of their websites.