Throughout each year, Necessity will offer various funding opportunities in alignment with its core themes. Our hope is that this will not only help support the capacity development of people, projects and networks across the UK, but also create a continual stream of ideas, provocations and learning for everyone who visits the site.

Each new funding opportunity will require certain levels of information, but the core aspect of the site is to develop relationships and foster a collaboration culture. This in turn will help identify emerging research themes and opportunities, which will also be funded.

FUNDING OPPORTUNITIES

This is the first of three funding rounds that will feature on Necessity over the next 12 months. Our hope in creating these opportunities is:

• To release capacity within people, projects and networks to do work that may be of real interest, but would be difficult to find resources and time to pursue.
• To contribute into the development of work and research that opens fresh insights across Necessity’s five themed areas.
• To produce fresh community stories and learning that can be shared within and beyond the Necessity site 

COMMUNITY INVESTIGATION ROUND ONE 

Below is a list of people and projects that are being supported in round one of the Community Investigation Fund:

PROJECT PAUSE

In light of the UK Government’s recent and ongoing rapid deportations of recently arrived asylum seekers and concerns regarding access to legal advice and the increasing hostile environment, coupled with the deteriorating conditions of accommodation provided, Project Pause is embarking on an evidence gathering exercise to expose and challenge the Home Offices policies, whilst ensuring the voices and experiences of those directly affected are front and centre.

TURAB SHAH

A documentary film project that explores and speaks to the Pakistani migrant experience in Burnley, an old industrial town in northern England. The film will collate the recollections and archives of a community that has endured the impacts of race from the colonial era through to the recent reemergence of the far right.

SHADO

shado is a multimedia platform driving culture-led system change at the intersection of arts, academia and activism. There are three arms to shado’s activity: the online and print magazine; events; and arts projects. Our mission is to learn from and commission those with lived experience of a global issue.

ST WERBURGHS FARM

The local and global picture has vastly changed since the Farm emerged in 1980. We need to radically rethink how we engage with our communities, with the land and with our food whilst addressing the Climate Emergency; the importance of equitable access and connection to nature; and dismantling the barriers to engagement faced by people that experience racism. Ultimately, we wish to redefine our vision so that it is fit for a future we want to be part of; an inclusive, accessible and regenerative urban agricultural space.

LANCASTER BLACK HISTORY

Lancaster Black History (LBH) is a new grassroots community group of local residents working to fight racism through education. This project working on slavery family trees in Lancaster will collaborate with 7 groups within Lancaster district to research five family trees of key slavery families. We plan to work with schools, university students, voluntary organisations, community and faith groups from across the city to produce to record community stories and learning that will allow local people to work together to face the past, and in doing so transform the future.

THREE BULL–MASTIFFS in a CORNER KITCHEN

We are making a short film created from an autobiographical poem, written by Sam Batley whilst he was going through recovery. It looks back at Sam’s formative years and the situations that led him to his current predicament, pressured behaviour and toxic masculinity passed from one corner kitchen to another. At our recovery living centre we have a large dilapidated outside building which we want to refurb into a workshop space to be used to support creativity in recovery. Using the theme of arts, sports and culture the building well be utilised by recovering people, the local community and visiting artists, therapists and musicians.

SHIFT

The project will highlight and give recognition to the voices and works of learning disabled artists across the UK. After initial consultancy with disabled artists around accessibility and what is needed, a series of short films will be created, alongside artwork documentation and live artist talks – all for digital presentation.

SOCIAL FARMS AND GARDENS NI

Food Security through Seed Saving and Exchange. During lockdown, a food revolution that had been bubbling exploded. People faced up to food insecurity and acted by digging up their gardens, filling their window boxes with salads and kale instead of pansies and petunias. This project will continue the seasonal cycle by encouraging and supporting communities to save and exchange seed in Northern Ireland.

Flat 70

Flat 70 is a non-profit arts family based in Elephant and Castle, London. Our space has been reclaimed for artists, cultural workers and local communities of colour. We are a home for artist development, artist care, cultural celebration and cultural exchange.

CO-OPERATIVE CREATIVE and CREATIVE APPRENTICESHIP MODEL (CCCAM)

Bertha MAD plans a culturally democratic co-operative model of apprenticeship to best tool up pro-active young creative citizens who might otherwise face extractivist higher education, youth

unemployment, and a climate of hopelessness. Our generative Bertha MAD DisCO will host a learning community, powering livelihoods and radical futures – connecting locally and globally.

BATTERSEA ARTS CENTRE

To fund two commissions for disabled artists to address the people who have and will acquire impairment because of COVID-19. This may include, but is not limited to, welcoming newly impaired people to disability culture and sharing disability culture wisdom.

LAW BREAKER

Law Breaker is a year-long action research project by artist-curator Thomas Abercromby that seeks to challenge Scotland’s prison industrial complex and how we respond to harm and crime without resorting to further policing or imprisonment. The project will be a close collaboration with working-class communities in Glasgow, resulting in public events such as screenings and workshops, a new community film which will act as a resource and toolkit for future community empowerment.

BLACK HISTORY SCHOOL

Black History School is a bespoke creative curriculum for children and families of Black heritage in Tower Hamlets and across the UK, to learn about history through play. This program provides arts-based social prescribing during the pandemic, fostering a supportive community network through shared heritage and creative healing experiences.

AALIYAH SHAIKH

Aaliyah  is a Cambridge graduate, psychotherapist, lecturer, final year PhD candidate in Health Psychology, Clinical Trauma Professional; experienced working with intergenerational and complex traumas. Founder of The RAHMAH Approach© to Psychology. She will be leading an edited book collating decolonised approaches to mental health and psychology from a Muslim perspective.

GARDENING EARTH LOGIC

Explores and shares new principles of governing urgent sustainability change for the fashion sector through a series of short films. The project is conducted by Kate Fletcher and Mathilda Tham, researchers and activists.

COMMONAGE 

An investigation about ownership, access, disruption and place. It uncovers the complexities and shares the possibilities of an infrastructure of urban alleyways, Belfast’s wild and liminal spaces. Commonage is developed across the disciplines of art and architecture by Amberlea Neely (Starling Start) and Aisling Rusk (Studio Idir).

SWE FIBRESHED

SWE Fibreshed is working to rebuild a homegrown fashion industry that goes beyond ‘sustainable’ to nourish our biosphere and our connection to it. By mapping our regional natural fibre and dye landscape we are beginning to create a more resilient, more equitable (eco)system that connects fibre farmers with processors, designers and consumers.

THE SUICIDE CHRONICLES

A collaborative artistic project led by Mark Storor working with communities impacted by suicide, aiming to collectively find a language to articulate and explore the complex, layered experience of suicide. Chronicle Three will be created with young people to investigate their relationship to this issue.    

COLIN GORDON

Will address the following research question: The small, family farm is a colonial concept. Having grown up on one, this feels jarring and urgent to examine. I will explore how a move towards “reparation agriculture” could enable agroecological farming to operate at landscape scales and for nutritious food to be more accessible, affordable and equitable.

SELF OTHER

The pandemic has upended many of our societal assumptions about what is valuable ‘key’ work. We are exploring care work alongside carers and the cared-for in a unique participatory action research project that aims to understand how we might care for one another in the future.

CHAYN 

The UK’s rape conviction rate is one of the lowest in the world, a national tragedy where survivors describe re-traumatising experiences. Our podcast investigates key cases, sharing the experiences of survivors from migrants, refugees, sex workers and LGBTQIA+ communities in the UK. Chayn is a survivor-led, non-profit producing intersectional resources.

MAY PROJECT GARDENS 

MPG is an award-winning CIC, working across South London to address poverty, disempowerment, access to resources and influence. We work with marginalised groups, mostly young people, people of colour and refugees, using what we consider universally connecting tools – nature, food and creative arts – for social change.

THE HUMAN NATURE PROJECT 

A public-access mental health promotion pilot taking place in Bristol woodlands from 2021- 2022 that will provide free, psycho-educational workshops for up to 3360 members of the public. The workshops will draw on evidence based spanning positive psychology, evolutionary psychology, neuroscience and forest medicine and be delivered by qualified therapists.

DOULAS WITHOUT BORDERS (DWB) 

A voluntary organisation spanning across the UK and offering grassroots support, advocacy and nurture to pregnant, birthing and newly mothering women, who are experiencing multiple disadvantages. We support women who are in financial hardship and have refugee and asylum seeking status, have experienced human slavery, sex trafficking, who have survived / been victims of or are experiencing intimate partner violence and / or sexual trauma, who are expecting baby loss, experiencing homelessness or are under 20 and unsupported.

LAND FOR WHO – towards an English Land Commission

A research project to understand existing proposals, policy, campaigns and practice that offer solutions for structural reform of the way land is owned and governed for the more generative and equitable uses we need. This will inform a process of identifying tangible actions and mobilising around making them a reality.

MEANWHILE CHARTER

A participatory action research project to collectively develop a meanwhile charter and practical handbook for the future, using Cardiff as a working example. The overall objective is on moving the debate from temporary meanwhile use to community led long term ownership and generative use of buildings and land.

BUILDING ALLIANCES in the PARALLEL STATE

The Parallel State is a breakaway state – a space to collectively imagine alternative solutions to life on earth – free from the oppositional constraints of the failed states in which we live. The Parallel State is building new alliances through a series of online events and laying the foundations for the 2021 Parallel State Summit.

@AParallelState.

SOCIAL ACTION & RESEARCH FOUNDATION 

Too often stories are told about us, not by us. Social Action & Research Foundation will work with 18-30 year olds, documenting their responses to unequal COVID-19 lockdowns. Focusing on Northern cities, SARF will explore whether practical and policy responses have deepened poverty and disaffection. A written and visual report will summarise the findings.’