For emerging artists, the path to a sustainable career has rarely seemed so narrow. In the wake of the pandemic, amid a prolonged cost-of-living crisis and years of declining public investment, artists are facing increasingly difficult decisions and are being pushed out of the industry. If we want a thriving cultural life, we must face an uncomfortable truth: our current funding model is failing creators.
For more than three decades, Arts UK has supported artists at pivotal moments in their careers. The alumni, including choreographer Sir Wayne MacGregor, novelist Ali Smith, theater director Rufus Norris, writer Alice Birch, director Asif Kapadia and painter Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, were supported not by tightly defined outcomes, but by trust: time, freedom and belief in the value of their practice and work. Since then, many have continued to shape Britain’s cultural life in profound ways. Year after year, we’ve seen that when artists are given resources unconditionally, they take risks, deepen their practice, and create work that resonates beyond the studio. This principle of trust remains largely absent from the funding landscape that artists must navigate.
US organizations have spent years building the evidence base for this principle, and the results are clear and unambiguous. While proof of concept alone does not lead to change, the economic and ethical case for acting on it is equally urgent in the UK, where artists and creatives are at the heart of the creative economy. It is worth more than £124 billion annually According to government figures. However, many of them are required to generate public cultural value while their financial security remains fragile.
In the United States, guaranteed income programs for artists have been independently evaluated with impressive results. Springboard for the Arts, based in St. Paul, Minnesota, runs one of the most well-established organizations Pilots have a guaranteed income For artists in the country. The program launched in 2021 alongside the City of St. Paul’s Grassroots Prosperity Program and has since expanded to include 100 artists across Minnesota, 50 in Otter Tail County, and 50 in the Frogtown/Rondo neighborhoods, continuing over five years. During the trial period, participants receive unrestricted monthly payments of $500 per month and free financial counseling and student and housing loans provided through LSS Financial Counseling. Evaluated in partnership with the University of Pennsylvania’s Center for Secure Income Research, the program’s results are clear: when artists can focus on their work, the benefits are widely felt by families and communities alike.
These pilots are gaining momentum in 2022 Innovators are rebuilding New York Providing 2,400 artists across New York State with a regular, no-strings-attached income of $1,000 per month over 18 months, resulting in reduced financial stress, improved mental health, and increased housing stability. Similarly, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts She ran a similar initiative in San Francisco in 2021 in partnership with the city, supporting 60 artists receiving $1,000 a month for 18 months, with recipients selected through six community organizations representing historically underserved groups, including the Black, Latino, Asian, and LGBTQ+ communities. She finds that predictable income enables artists to spend more time on creative work and maintain long-term practice.
Similar results were seen in Ireland, where Govt Basic income for the arts The program supports around 2,000 artists and creative workers with €325 per week. What began as a pilot has since become a prominent cultural policy. In late 2025, the Irish Government confirmed its intention to expand the scope and inclusion of the program beyond its initial pilot phase, with Continuing to secure public funding. Evaluations show that participants spend more time on creative work, rely less on welfare support, and report improved well-being More than €100 million in estimated social and economic benefits.
Despite this growing body of international evidence, the UK funding landscape has been slow to respond. Public funding has become increasingly prescriptive, competitive, short-term and project-based, rewarding the ability to write applications rather than sustained excellence or long-term potential. Often times, artists are expected to accept low fees or unpaid development time in exchange for “exposure” or a future opportunity. Rising rents and costs of living, coupled with the erosion of affordable studio space, are hitting artists particularly hard and mean that talented artists face significant barriers before their practices have had enough time to mature and flourish. For many, survival depends on unpaid work, personal debt, or family support—a system that has historically, and still quietly, excludes those without financial safety nets. This is not only unfair; It impoverishes our cultural ecosystem.
There is now a growing consensus across the sector that artists deserve fair pay. This is welcome and long overdue. However, fair pay alone cannot fix a system characterized by intermittent work, long unpaid gaps, and chronic underinvestment. Fair wages must be the basis, not the ceiling. Without broader income security, even moderately paid work falls within an economy that remains fundamentally unstable.
These concerns are not new, nor are they limited to independent artists themselves, but have recently been formally acknowledged at the policy level. The recent independent review of Arts Council England, the national funding body, chaired by Baroness Hodge, recognized that artists are the foundation of the cultural sector, and called for a rebalancing of investment away from buildings and institutions alone and towards greater direct support for artists. In its response, Arts Council England accepted this challenge and committed to developing a new service for individuals by 2027-28, combining a national funding program with improved advice, training and support throughout the career. The ambition is high, but the structural change it promises is still in the making, and artists navigating the sector today must do so within a system that has yet to catch up. American organizations have already gone through many years to prove their success.
Likewise, recent announcements from the Department for Culture, Media and Sport have focused on much-needed investment in the country Museums and cultural infrastructure. While these interventions are vital to protecting collections and places, they leave artists – whose work drives these institutions – largely outside the framework of central cultural policy.
Alongside these broader political developments, a quieter shift is underway. Small but important experiments have begun to point toward alternative approaches. In Gloucester, arts organization Strike A Light Working artists On two-and-a-half-year paid contracts, providing stability without fixed outputs or fixed application cycles. On Teesside, Artist of the yearfunded through the UK Shared Prosperity Fund delivered by the Mayor of Tees Valley and the Combined Authority, provides one artist per year with a guaranteed income, work space and support, enabling them to focus on their practice while contributing to local cultural life. In Scotland, a small pilot program led by… Take me somewhere It provided artists with regular income support and found measurable improvements in financial stability, well-being, and creative focus. Likewise, Cove Park hires three Embedded artists On 17-month salaried contracts to develop and deliver a new community engagement programme, providing employment status, travel allowance and space for their creative practice alongside community-facing work. In the run-up to the Scottish Parliament elections, Scottish Labor leader Anas Sarwar recently pledged this Experience a new push for artistswhich will increase the income of up to 1,000 artists and creators to ensure a real living wage.
Clearly, unrestricted funding does not stifle creativity; enables him to do so. Arts Foundation We support artists with unconditional fellowships because we know that trust, time, and independence matter and spark extraordinary creative endeavors. Such schemes complement fair pay by giving artists the security needed to refuse low-paid work and negotiate contracts from a position of strength. Crucially, income security also expands access to the arts, supporting artists from working class and underrepresented backgrounds who are currently the most likely to have to leave the field altogether.
The work of the Arts Foundation and these initiatives is not limited to charitable work only. It is about recognizing the work of art as work, and culture as a common good and a human right. The risks extend beyond individual artists. At a time when trust in public life is at stake, artists play a vital role in helping us think, imagine and communicate, and enriching education, health, civic life and the economy. As a policy tool, guaranteed income holds real potential to address entrenched economic inequality, and there is a compelling case for putting artists at the heart of these efforts.
America’s guaranteed income pioneers have worked hard to prove this model. The question now for policymakers, philanthropists and cultural institutions on both sides of the Atlantic is whether we are willing to work towards making this happen. If the UK is serious about cultural regeneration, we must invest in systems that allow artists to not only survive, but also build and sustain meaningful, long-term careers. Without structural change, we will continue to lose talented artists from this sector, dimming the voices that shape our shared culture.
Philanthropy plays an important role, but it alone cannot solve systemic fragility. At the Arts Foundation, we have ambitions to grow our work and welcome being part of this solution, as providing unconditional funding directly to artists is no longer a niche area; It’s a bold, evidence-backed place to start.
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