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
Below is an update on the second of three funding rounds that are planned before the summer. Our hope in creating these opportunities is three-fold:
- 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
ROUND TWO: EXPLORING THE QUESTIONS
Below are the 24 projects that have been funded in Necessity Round 2: Exploring the Questions. They were selected from 487 proposals and will receive grants amounting to £400,000 for their work. In the coming weeks and months, Necessity will also be exploring ideas for what we hope will be a themed curated programme in the Autumn.
Afri-Co-Lab was made in response to the darkness of the pandemics. On paper a community interest company, in reality a space to dream collectively. We’re embarking on a journey, making a documentary about creating a Future Space, a place to imagine, to grieve, to create sustainably as a community together across differences.
We are the Agency of Visible Women. We are an intersectional artists network for women and marginalised genders. We draw from our multifaceted, lived experiences to imagine and build a sustainable future based on care, accessibility and an alternate value of our worth in the arts and beyond.
Anaka Women’s Collective are women who use our collective skills to educate, support, advocate, and celebrate each other. Based in Belfast and led, predominantly, by women who have experienced or are experiencing the asylum system, we aim to empower each other and foster resilience in the face of an oppressive immigration system.
Anike is a writer and founder of Ọ̀RỌ̀ÀNÍKÉ, a hub of resources and conversations centred around storytelling relating to African heritage. She is also the author of Connecting to Self Through Ancestry, a collection of essays that explore links between heritage and wellbeing.
Ar Y Gwynt/On The Wind is about creating sustainable kites in community settings. Through the collaborative processes of construction and decoration we explore the things we want to let go of and the things we want to hold onto: this is manifested in the shared joy of kite flying.
Breaks & Joins is about repair; mending our stuff, our communities and ourselves. We’ll blend practical repair, clay and text workshops that lead to localised installations, and community building training. We’re a group with a wide range of experience, who are passionate about opening up conversation to reflect, resist, rebuild and reimagine.
Climate Class: What does climate change mean for the working class? Ecofascism. Inequality. Greenwashing. Intersectionality. Consumerism. A series of short experimental documentary films will connect working class creatives across Liverpool in an attempt to question what the future holds for the city and its people under a state of climate emergency.
The Class Work Project is a workers co-op which publishes literature from poor and working class writers, centering their experiences and knowledge in order to challenge elitist knowledge production. They run workshops on class within social movement spaces, in order to develop stronger understandings and facilitate effective mobilizations in the fight for radical social change.
For They Let In The Light is a new collaboration between the Coborn Centre for Adolescent Mental Health, Chisenhale Gallery and artist and mental health activist the vacuum cleaner. The project seeks to centre young peoples experiences and voices of the epidemic of mental health through film.
Hwa Young Jung – working with young people in Peterborough not in mainstream education (NACRO Education Centre), we investigate animals that have made their home in the city, to co-create a game about urban wildlife. We explore an interdisciplinary collaboration between art, criminology and penal reform to inform social and climate justice.
LOCAL: A season of online storytelling produced by Skin Deep and curated by RESOLVE, featuring writing, illustration and video by Black and POC freelance creatives. This season will celebrate how diaspora communities in the UK shape local urban spaces and their built environment, and envision new local power structures and institutions.
Lora V Krasteva is a theatre maker and cultural producer. She runs Global Voices Theatre and works at Arts & Homelessness International. She will be working to centre the experiences of 1st generation migrants, exploring ideas of identity, home & hospitality using theatre and creativity as a tool for change.
Migrants in Culture is a network of migrants organising to create the conditions of safety, agency and solidarity in the culture sector for migrants, people of colour and others impacted by the UK’s immigration regime. Necessity’s support will help us refocus as a cultural movement organising towards open border futures.
performingborders is a curatorial research-through-creation platform that since 2016 has been inviting live artists, experimental writers, thinkers, and activists to research notions and lived experiences of intersectional borders. performingborders creates live and digital spaces, gatherings, and commissions that focus on communal discussions, sharings and exchanges of lived knowledge and ideas around cultural, racial, gendered and everyday borders among others. https://performingborders.live
A Radical Archive – The Le Bas Archive & Collection. A radical archive from the marginalised, wherein precious, unvaunted voices feed new dialogues, art and discussions. A resource for resistance, creating solidarities between society’s undervalued. A riposte to politics of division, exclusion and oversimplification. A spark of creative union between published and emerging voices, contributing to public debate and collaboration.
The Rhyming Guide to Gentrification is a 60 minute documentary that dismantles and offers radical solutions to gentrification. Presented in rhyme by Spoken Word artist and community organiser Potent Whisper – this is your invitation to meet activists on the front line of economic warfare and learn how to fight back!
The SANE Collective aims to create spaces for conversations where the widest possible diversity of people living and working in the City come together and feel their shared strength. With solidarity and collaboration, together we will make A People’s Plan for Glasgow – not another corporate strategy, but a democratic platform for change.
Self/care in a time of intolerance – Ministry of Others…and company Self/care in a time of intolerance is a collective inquiry by artists, art psychotherapists and members of the public into what self/care might usefully look like for those who face racial intolerance and all those who attempt to tackle it. A curated online support offer will emerge.
The Justlife Creative Studio is a collective of artists in Brighton & Hove who have lived experience of homelessness. We will be hosting a series of artist’s in residence, run workshops and hold studio space, enabling the telling of stories and giving of voice.
Sheltered in Place, created by Split Britches, is a digital house where we can come together to imagine radical alternatives, join comrades in care, share ideas that keep us going, and experience some art.
It’s a website – shelteredinplace.net- where we can gather virtually in places like living rooms and porches, attic galleries and bedroom performance spaces, backyard cafes and basement studios. Dedicated to art and conversation, Sheltered in Place is a digital house for art and performance that considers what it means to stay, to reside, to inhabit, and also a home for Lois Weaver’s open-source protocols for public conversation like Long Tables, Porch Sittings, Care Cafés, Public Studios, and Situation Rooms. Come talk to us.
SIYAKHULKUMA PODCAST: Nico Ndlovu, founder and director for SIYAKHULUMA We Talk Podcast and That Guy Comedy Show. We Talk is a platform that gives asylum seekers and communities voices to be heard. Every week we record and upload new conversations. We talk to people in refugee community to help share happiness and hope.
Sounding the Voices: Scoring collaborative exchanges between six women with lived experience of challenging histories – this textured ‘poem’ of listening and learning proposes an accumulating ‘call and response’ for troubled times. How might we ‘sound’ the space between our pasts and presents, personally and collectively, to shape futures resisting complacency and despair? Andrea Luka Zimmerman is an artist and filmmaker whose work is concerned with marginalisation, social justice and a search for radicalised re-relations, between people, place, ecology.
Syntax is a collective of poets and creatives that make art with words. Most either live or work in Peterborough. Syntax has become the lungs of a poetry community that has always worked together for each other, for the good of poetry, Peterborough and its communities. Syntax also manages and mentors the Poet Laureate role which there are two of, supporting these poets to develop their voices, represent parts of the city that is often overlooked and to tell new stories.
Young Identity is a network of creative freelancers. Redefining the parameters of poetry and performance with young people. For Such A Time As This is part of our artistic season, reimagining the future. When the world is on fire, we make art! Young Identity writers will respond to these provocations creating a piece of organic art.