The Arts Impact Fund was created with the ambition of empowering the sector to achieve its social and artistic aspirations through building financial resilience via access to dedicated, flexible and affordable repayable finance.

Financial resilience is very much context dependent rather than an absolute, objective and comparable state of being. A broad range of qualitative and quantitative indicators was therefore selected for the research, reflecting the lack of a silver bullet definition as well as the varying quality of available information.

There are clearly many factors influencing an organisation’s financial resilience other than the Arts Impact Fund loan and these were not analysed in any meaningful sense.  Nevertheless, the results are both encouraging and illuminating and we hope that they will not only influence how we best support arts & culture organisations but also prove useful to organisations considering whether repayable finance represents an appropriate option.

As the impact of the pandemic recedes, we will continue to build an increasingly robust evidence base which will also include investees from our most recent fund, the Arts & Culture Impact Fund.  We are encouraged that our research helps to support our belief that funding which aligns with an organisation’s mission and organisational capacity should be able to support its financial resilience. Having sufficient appropriate funding available to support arts & culture organisations across the UK, but also internationally, is vital to the development of a thriving sector which can take creative risks and deliver excellence across financial, impact and artistic objectives.