Announcement: Culture Recovery Fund Success

We are hugely relieved and thankful that this morning we found out that CDS has been successful in our application for £60,328 from the Culture Recovery Fund – our tiny but vital portion of the government’s £1.57 billion ‘bail-out’ for culture, distributed by Arts Council England.

This grant stabilises the organisation and enables us to weather the uncertainties of the coming 6 months, as well as rebuilding our reserves from the impact of closures and cancellations this spring and summer. 

In that time, we’re going to be focussing on re-building our core space hire business with our new low-contact operational model, while stripping back unviable programmes to focus on an organisational review that integrates anti-racist structural change with COVID-adaptive business planning and a renewal of our vision and mission.

We believe this strategy balances financial risk, safety of staff and users, and ensures that CDS can continue to survive and then thrive again, while using this enforced pause as a necessary point of reflection from which to rebuild.

For CDS’s survival in 2020, we’re also immensely thankful for additional funds awarded from Arts Council England’s initial Emergency Response Fund; The Backstage Trust; the Mayor of London’s Culture at Risk Business Support Fund and the Creative Land Trust; Action for Bow; the Sylvia Waddilove Foundation; and especially thankful to all 144 individual donors large and small, plus the Mayor of London’s Back to Business Fund, who together brought our crowdfunding campaign total to £12,000 – for our artist Members to use our studios.

Founded by artists, and still artist Member-led, we’re committed to supporting independent artists wherever we can through the continued uncertainty in our industry. This Culture Recovery Fund grant ensures that we can continue this work and put our efforts into the fundraising of projects that pay artists and freelancers.

We re-opened for rehearsal studio hire on 1st September, and on September 12th we resumed an adapted children’s classes programme, thanks to a grant from Action for Bow. We’re delighted that Rachael Davies has recently begun work on her PhD on CDS’ archives, at Coventry University’s Centre for Dance Research (CDaRE), and we’re currently working on future plans and projects including the postponed second edition of Encounter Bow for 2021, and partnering with The Place on a weekend festival in February.

There’ll be more updates soon, but in the meantime, if you’re working on a new project and need studio space, please think about hiring CDS. We’re now accepting pencilled booking ahead of confirmed funding, and have adapted our operations to make the space COVID-safe. More information.