Arts Alive in Shropshire and Herefordshire has been awarded £180,000 from the BFI National Lottery Audience Projects Fund.
The Rural Touring Scheme will appoint two new part time roles (Audience Outreach and Digital Marketing) to engage new audiences in specific areas across Shropshire and Herefordshire 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.
The funding award is part of the new BFI National Lottery Audience Projects Fund. A total of almost £6.5m will support ambitious, audience-facing independent UK and international film and broader screen activity of national scale from April 2023.
The funding supports six venues, four festival and specialist projects, and three audience development organisations over three years; as well as four awards for short-term activity.
The 17 projects combined aim to generate 4.67m admissions UK-wide. These initial awards from the fund see work to deliver against priorities to support inclusive activity, grow underrepresented audiences and have a UK-wide impact.
The awards represent support for 203,846 screenings, of which 91,357 will be accessible screenings (45%); the average number of accessible screenings per project is 50%. Of the 17 awards, 11 are to organisations based outside of London and South East England, although all awarded projects will have activity outside the region.
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 underserved 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.”