Arts at the heart

It is 25 years since Paul Hamlyn Foundation was set up, during which time we have spent around £200m on grant-making for activities by a whole range of organisations. The arts has been a sector in which we have invested heavily, but it has played a deep role in the way we go about our other business. We also run programmes focusing on education and learning, social justice, and in India, and the arts imbue this wider work. Many arts-based activities are funded by these other programmes – and indeed many of our arts grants have learning or social justice at their core. It goes without saying that we believe the arts have a strong role to play in society and, to quote the broadcaster John Wilson, keynote speaker at our recent Awards for Artists reception: “By making awards like this the Paul Hamlyn Foundation is saying that artists are important and should be supported to continue practising and developing their work.”

Our position as an independent grant-maker gives us the freedom to commit money to try things out

The Awards for Artists, announced last month, have been made every year since 1994, building an impressive cohort of recipients and a fitting ‘flagship’ for our arts programme. But in many ways our artists’ awards are the exception rather than the rule. They are the only instance in which we support individuals rather than organisations. But we are also not usually so removed from the activity of our grantees, and the ‘no-strings’ funding we provide for individual awards recipients is unlike our Open Grants schemes, through which we engage in a range of structured funding relationships with organisations, and which make up a large part of our £20m annual spend.
We recently carried out a study on the impact of our grant-making. We did this through the development of an ‘impact framework’ that has allowed us to see where our grants are having an effect. It is still a work in progress but preliminary findings make for interesting reading. Across a representative sample of UK grants completed between 2007 and 2012, the evidence indicates that 38% led to increased access to and participation in the arts and cultural activity, and 18% provided artists with new opportunities to pursue ideas and develop new work – with many instances of these coming through funding for non-arts organisations. Above this though, across all our grants, more than half (56%) have benefitted marginalised children and young people who have developed improved life skills and wellbeing and/or skills to enhance job prospects and build a more successful future. Many grants achieved more than one outcome, but it is telling that each of the main outcomes (we identified 14) have been delivered by each of our UK programmes. It is clear that much of the social impact we have identified has come from arts-related funding. We believe this backs up our belief in the power of the arts to deliver social benefit.
Young people are a recurring theme through much of our work, reflected in activities ranging from our Musical Futures special initiative (on music teaching and learning in schools) to our Supported Options initiative, which is working to find ways of providing support for young undocumented migrants. Young people form an important part of our mission and we identify the group as a particular target for our impact, but this focus is even more important at the moment as young people are facing significant problems such as unemployment and lack of opportunity.
Philanthropic funding, to the arts or anywhere else, is not going to provide the solution to these problems. The totality of UK foundations’ spend would amount to only a fraction of the resources the state has at its disposal to effect change. But, our position as an independent grant-maker gives us the freedom to commit money to try things out, and to stay the course when the political mood changes – traits governments rarely display. So while we are not able to directly create employment opportunities at any scale, we can look for innovative ways in which young people can be supported to participate in cultural activities – with all of the benefits to communication skills, confidence and well-being that we know can be derived from them. And funding to develop organisations’ capacity, and advocacy through bodies such as the Cultural Learning Alliance, mean that we are able to support the health of the cultural sector – which is increasingly being recognised as such an important area for potential growth.
Our mission is to enable people to realise their potential and maximise their quality of life, now and in the future, and a strategic aim is to exist in perpetuity. We are proud to be celebrating 25 years as a grant-maker, during which time we have helped many thousands of people to realise their potential. We intend still to be here in another 25. Support for arts organisations will continue to play an important role in the delivery of this mission.

Unique gifts

On top of the regular grant-making and Special Initiatives, during 2012/13 Paul Hamlyn Foundation is making a set of unique gifts to organisations we know well and whose work we recognise as having significant impact on people and communities. We began in October with a £5m endowment for the Roundhouse Studios in north London – money that will secure the future of the suite of facilities used by around 3,000 young people a year to gain training and experience in creative skills including radio and video production, music, dance, spoken word and much else. We recently followed this up with a £1m gift in India, for the Jaipur Foot organisation, a charity that provides free prosthetic limbs for people throughout India and other developing countries. A third announcement will be made shortly and more will follow in the New Year.

Robert Dufton is Director of Paul Hamlyn Foundation.
www.phf.org.uk