Alexa Cobbold York Theatre Royal have expressed their delight at the Arts Council’s decision to award Catalyst funding of £225,000, paid over three years, to both their company and that of Pilot Theatre, based in the nearby De Grey House. A spokesperson for York Theatre Royal announced, “We are delighted that we have been successful in our bid for Catalyst funds. Our application with Pilot Theatre Company demonstrated our commitment to partnership work. It is our ambition to strengthen and build on all the fantastic work we have been doing in York and beyond over the last few years.” The Catalyst funding has been awarded in order to support the two theatres and aid them in conducting fundraising activities which will in turn secure them further investments meaning an increase in creative events, new and exciting work and more involvement of the community in both companies. A spokesperson for the Pilot Theatre added, “We welcome the opportunity this additional funding gives us and our partner, York Theatre Royal, to create a whole range of activities involving our communities, both local, regional and national.”
The partner organisations are two of just 173 organisations who have been awarded this Catalyst funding which is co-funded by investments from the Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS), Arts Council England and the Heritage Lottery Fund. The scheme will release the funds over a period of three years allowing the companies to work on a step by step approach to organising and raising funds for themselves. The Catalyst website states that “organisations will use funds in the first year to gear up resources and build capacity. In the second and third years, funding will increasingly be used as match funding to incentivise donations.”
Catalyst funding is only awarded to those companies who have shown commitment to changing the way in which they raise funds and can show that they intend to follow step by step change, which will lead to them becoming much more financially and organisationally stable and able to rely more on their own knowledge of fundraising in the future.
