Shropshire arts group celebrates £180,000 funding boost
A Shropshire arts project has been awarded £180,000 as it plans to engage new audiences across the region.
Arts Alive, in Shropshire and Herefordshire, has been awarded the money from the BFI National Lottery Audience Projects Fund for its Flicks in the Sticks – Reaching Out project.
The rural touring scheme will appoint two new part time roles – an audience outreach and a digital marketing officer – to engage with audiences in specific areas through new and innovative marketing approaches.
Arts Alive partners with people in rural communities to organise over 1,000 high quality events each year, including cinema, live music, theatre, dance, and storytelling shows in village halls and community centres to ensure that affordable arts and film is available to every person in Shropshire and Herefordshire.
Ben Luxford, BFI’s head of UK audiences, said: “As we kick off our new BFI National Lottery strategy, we’re proud to support these organisations to focus on the necessity of growing new audiences, to celebrate and champion fantastic screen culture and enrich communities across the UK.
"Our National Lottery funding is for public benefit, so we are working with projects which have demonstrated a strong commitment to reaching and welcoming audiences who are currently under-served by their activities. These projects also demonstrate the variety of activity and organisations we can support through the fund, which I hope inspires future applicants.”
The BFI National Lottery Audience Projects Fund has £15m available over the three years of the BFI’s new National Lottery Funding Plan to support the UK exhibition and distribution sector to grow audiences for UK independent film and extended reality/broader screen work.
The open access fund will support a wide range of ambitious, audience-facing activity of national scale, including multi-year and research and development projects.
It welcomes applications from organisations that are focused on increasing access and growing the engagement of audiences that are representative of the UK population.
The fund is part of a £27.6m National Lottery allocation that the BFI has made for supporting audiences over the three years of the Funding Plan.
Other programmes include continuing the vital work of the BFI Film Audience Network and the new BFI National Lottery Open Cinemas initiative, which aims to develop the offer made by independent distribution and exhibition and to ensure more audiences can participate.
