Supporting quality arts provision for young people across the North East in school and youth settings

About North East Cultural Learning Fund (formerly Culture Bridge)

The North East Cultural Learning Fund (formerly know as Culture Bridge Fund) provides grants to support working relationships between cultural organisations / arts practitioners and school / youth settings.

Who can apply

Applications are welcomed from both the youth settings (including schools) or cultural organisations. Previous awards have included school trips to museums galleries or theatres as well as direct interventions such as a theatre company working with a whole class to write and stage a new play.

This fund is always hugely oversubscribed. To help organisations (in particular schools) decide about allocating resources to making an application; in 24/25 the fund received 21 applications with funding available for four projects. Fundable projects are sometimes picked up by other funds at the Community Foundation.

Application Considerations

For schools making applications please pay careful attention to your governance structure. In particular, schools that are part of a Multi Academy Trust will need to ensure that applications are made from the Trust as the accountable body.

These grants are not available to freelance artists.

The strongest applications will be those that evidence a developing or established relationship with local partner organisations and / or artists. We understand it is not always possible to have an established working relationship before the funding is secured, in which case please provide an idea of how you will source partners.

Priority will be given to applications that demonstrate longer term impact and / or those that include an element of co-creation with CYP. As such one-off events are unlikely to be successful. Those that show there is an intention to build on the initial work are likely to be deemed a higher priority.

The awards are made by a panel drawn from the education sector, arts and culture sector and business.

To make an application, please click here