Freelands Foundation Limited

Freelands Foundation is a UK charity dedicated to ensuring universal access to visual arts education and participation, empowering individuals regardless of background to engage with and enjoy contemporary art, broadening audiences and transforming life opportunities through creative aspiration. Anchored in the intrinsic value of art, creative making, and material literacy, it views teaching as an artistic act intertwined with practice, championing lifelong learning, diverse pedagogical approaches, and collaborative partnerships among artists, educators, schools, universities, museums, and galleries. Its impact approach fosters bold, inclusive systems for progressive art education, structural equity, and innovation at all levels from primary to postgraduate and informal settings.

It prioritizes visual arts education initiatives championing material-based creative practice, diversity, inclusion, and tackling racial inequality in the sector, supporting practising artists, art educators, children and young people, and underrepresented groups facing barriers from geography, socio-economic status, or ethnicity. Funded activities encompass artist fellowships, residencies, awards, academic commissions, partnerships, action research, workshops, exhibitions, publications, films, and open-access resource libraries nurturing emerging artists, innovative teaching methods, capacity building, and new audience engagement channels. It backs projects advancing underrepresented artists including women artists, regional contemporary art spaces, galleries, and educational institutions through multi-year programme grants, revenue support, bursaries, and infrastructure for experimentation, removing access inequalities, promoting representation, and enabling collaborative creative arts interventions that build skills, confidence, and sectoral transformation.

Exclusions include unrestricted funding, capital grants outside specified programmes, and non-arts activities; it avoids duplicative or mainstream provision lacking innovation. Distinctive for its singular dedication to contemporary visual arts education, it uniquely emphasizes material literacy, artist-educator partnerships, and UK-wide reach prioritizing non-metropolitan regions, mid-sized organizations, and interventions addressing underrepresentation, with a progressive philosophy demanding equity-driven, evidence-informed practice and long-term systemic change over short-term outputs. Preferred partners demonstrate lived experience in diversity, grassroots innovation, and commitment to inclusive creative arts for transformative impact.