MAYK receives Arts Council England Catalyst Small Grants Award

MAYK is delighted to be a recipient of Arts Council England’s Catalyst Small Grants programme.

Catalyst Small Grants is designed to help organisations build their fundraising capacity and become more resilient.

In the last year, we’ve been reimagining our programme as a building-less producing house, now Mayfest has moved to a biennial model. This new rhythm means we can produce more projects outside the festival (like our recent collaboration with organisations in Rwanda and Uganda on Can You Hear Me Now), present bold, exciting new work in the city (like RashDash’s Three Sisters – coming to Tobacco Factory Theatres in summer), and invest more time in building relationships with artists and deepening engagement with audiences on Mayfest itself. 

But we also recognise that in a climate of continued ‘austerity’ public funding is shrinking. For a small organisation like MAYK to put these ambitious plans into practice, we need to begin to think about other new partnerships and new ways of bringing in investment to the company.

Catalyst Funding will help us do exactly that. It enables our small team to invest more time into strategic thinking, fundraising and partnership building, by providing us with producing expertise to help us deliver the many projects we produce alongside Mayfest.

It will also open up new relationships with individuals and businesses, through a number of events in 2018 and 2019 designed to celebrate our existing supporters, make new friends and show those who maybe don’t know what we do how they could get involved.

The work begins now. We have ambitious and exciting plans for Mayfest 2018 and for a range of unique projects outside the festival in Bristol and beyond, and this grant from Arts Council England will help us find new ways to make them a reality.