The St Hugh’s Commissioning Award

A new Award Scheme for organisations will be available in 2010.
Details will appear on this website later.

2008 Award

The St Hugh’s Commissioning Award is designed to encourage corporate organisations to commission new public work in any art-form (or in a combination of art-forms) for performance or for permanent location within the region; and in doing so, to support and promote the work of arts practitioners, and to make the arts available and accessible to the public, engaging communities in the process.

Who may apply?

Applicant organisations must be based in either Lincolnshire or the former Humberside (as defined by local government boundaries at January 1992), and regularly working in one or both of these areas.

Applicant organisations may be public bodies such as local authorities, arts centres, established not-for-profit arts organisations, education or training providers, or they could be private sector businesses acting for the public benefit. This Award programme is not intended for individual applicants. The person submitting the proposal must be a senior official of the applicant, acting with the organisation’s full authority and able to enter into binding commitments on its behalf.

What is the Commissioning Award for?

The Award is expected to act as a catalyst in encouraging corporate organisations to conceive and carry out innovative and developmental arts projects, relevant to the needs and aspirations of communities in their localities, by commissioning new public work. Projects may be in any art-form including theatre, dance, music, literature, visual and broadcast media, the fine and applied arts, or may involve a combination of art-forms. They must produce tangible and, in some sense, durable outcomes which make lasting contributions to the quality of the public realm or public experience. Work that is essentially conceptual or wholly ephemeral will not be appropriate for this programme.

Proposals should be based on commissioning work of high quality from established practitioners who have a strong track record in their field of work. In order to select the practitioner(s) to be commissioned, applicants will normally be expected to propose an open, or at least a limited field selection process, or in some other way to demonstrate that a range of experienced practitioners will be considered. The field from which practitioners are selected need not necessarily be restricted to this region of benefit, although the Foundation does wish to see regional professional arts practitioners considered, alongside others.

Projects would be expected to involve local communities actively in the selection and development of the work, in whatever way is considered appropriate. Elements of education work are likely to form part of the proposals. Making the arts available and accessible to the public, and particularly to young people, should be central to all proposals.

Applicants should bear in mind that the Foundation does not see itself as a source of top-up funding for projects already planned and launched under other public programmes; nor does it wish to make-good shortfalls in mainstream public funding. We hope the Commissioning Award will lead to new initiatives. At the same time, we do not expect to pay for the whole cost of the project. Applicants should be able to demonstrate how they intend to plan and carry through a complex project; to produce a realistic and balanced budget, drawing on other sources of secured funding; and to acknowledge the Foundation’s support publicly throughout the project.

Successful applicants will be expected to submit regular interim progress reports; and on completion, to provide a final report of at least five sides of A4 typed, plus illustrations, sufficiently bound to provide a permanent record of the Award’s achievement. This report may subsequently be published on the Foundation’s website, and must therefore also be submitted on CD.

What funding is available?

It is the Trustees’ intention to make a single award of up to £14,000, but they reserve the right, at their discretion, to make two awards within this total.

Click here for 2008 Application Procedure