Trust-based Funding Works. Why Are Artists Still Living In Difficulty?

For emerging artists, the road to a sustainable career rarely feels narrow. After the pandemic, between the crisis of the cost of living and years of declining public investment, artists are faced with increasingly difficult decisions and are being pushed out of the industry. If we want a thriving cultural life, we have to face an unpleasant reality: our current funding model is failing creators.

For over three decades, the Arts Foundation UK has supported artists at key moments in their careers. The alumni, including composer Sir Wayne McGregor, novelist Ali Smith, theater director Rufus Norris, writer Alice Birch, film producer Asif Kapadia and artist Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, are not supported by rigidly imposed results, but by trust: time, freedom and belief in the value of doing their work. Many have since gone on to shape British cultural life in profound ways. Year after year, we’ve seen that when artists are offered wireless resources, they take risks, deepen their practice and create work that resonates beyond the studio. This principle of trust is often absent in the context of the funding that artists must use.

American organizations have spent years building the evidence base for this system, and the results are indisputable. While proof of concept alone is not revolutionary, the economic and ethical situation is equally urgent in the UK, where artists and creators sit at the heart of the arts economy, which is worth more than £124 billion a year according to government figures. Yet many are asked to produce social cultural value while their financial security remains fragile.

In the United States, guaranteed income programs for artists have been independently tested with surprising results. Springboard for the Arts, based in Saint Paul, Minnesota, is running one of the largest guaranteed artist salary pilots in the country. The program was launched in 2021 near the City of St. Paul’s People’s Prosperity Pilot has also been expanded to reach 100 artists across Minnesota, 50 in Otter Tail County and 50 in the Frogtown/Rondo area, which has been maintained for over five years. During the pilot, participants receive unlimited monthly payments of $500 per month and free financing, student loan debt and housing counseling delivered through LSS Financial Counseling. Tested in collaboration with the University of Pennsylvania’s Center for Guaranteed Income Research, the program’s findings are clear: when artists can focus on their work, the benefits are felt widely by families and communities alike.

Such pilots gained momentum in 2022, when Creatives Rebuild New York provided 2,400 artists across New York state with a regular, unattached stipend of $1,000 per month over 18 months, resulting in less financial stress, better mental health and greater housing stability. Similarly, the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts ran a similar campaign in San Francisco in 2021 in partnership with the city, supporting 60 artists who receive $1,000 per month for 18 months, with recipients selected through six community organizations representing historically underserved groups, including the Black, Latinx, Asian and LGBTQ+ communities. It found that predictable income enables artists to spend more time on art and continue practicing for longer.

Similar results have been seen in Ireland, where the government’s Basic Income for the Arts scheme supports around 2,000 artists and creative workers on €325 a week. What started as a pilot has since become a landmark cultural policy. Towards the end of 2025, the Irish government confirmed its intention to extend and embed the program beyond its initial pilot phase, with continued public funding. The assessment shows participants spending more time on creative work, relying less on social support and reporting improved well-being, over €100 million in estimated social and economic benefits.

Despite this growing international evidence, the UK’s funding situation has been slow to respond. Government funding is increasingly prescriptive, competitive, short-term and project-based, rewarding the ability to write applications rather than sustained excellence or long-term capacity. Oftentimes, artists are expected to accept low fees or unpaid development time in exchange for “exposure” or future opportunity. Rising rents and living costs, as well as the erosion of affordable studio space, are hitting artists hard and mean that talented artists face significant obstacles before their practice has time to mature and flourish. For many, survival depends on unpaid work, personal debt or family support—a system that historically, and quietly continues, excludes those without financial safety nets. This is not only unfair; it undermines our cultural ecosystem.

There is now a growing consensus across the industry that artists deserve to be paid fairly. This is welcome and long overdue. However, fair pay alone cannot fix a system characterized by short-term employment, long unpaid vacancies and chronic underinvestment. A fair wage should be a base, not a ceiling. Without broad income security, even well-paid work remains in an ever-fragile economy.

This concern is not new, and it is not limited to independent artists themselves, but has recently been officially recognized at the policy level. A recent independent review of the national funding organization Arts Council England, whose chair Baroness Hodge, acknowledged that artists are the foundation of the cultural sector and called for a rebalancing of investment away from buildings and institutions only and to support direct support for artists. In its response, Arts Council England has embraced this challenge and committed to developing a new Individuals Service by 2027-28, integrating the national funding system with improved advice, training and long-term support. Ambition is important, but the structural change it promises is still being designed, and artists navigating the field today must do so with an unmet agenda. American organizations have years already to prove that it works.

Similarly, recent announcements from the Ministry of Culture, Media and Sport focus on much-needed investment in cultural reserves and infrastructure. Although these interventions are important to protect collections and spaces, they leave artists—whose work animates these institutions—largely outside the framework of central cultural policy.

Alongside these broad policy developments, there is a quiet shift underway. Small but important experiments have begun to point to alternatives. In Gloucester, arts organization Strike A Light employs artists on two-and-a-half-year paid contracts, offering stability without consistent results or constant application cycles. In Teesside, Artist of the Year, funded by the UK Shared Prosperity Fund and presented by the Tees Valley Mayor and Combined Authority, provides one artist each year with a guaranteed income, workspace and support, enabling them to focus on their careers while contributing to the local cultural life. In Scotland, a small pilot program led by Take Me Somewhere has provided artists with regular income support and measurable improvements in financial stability, well-being and creative focus. Similarly, Cove Park is appointing three Embedded Artists on 17-month salaried contracts to develop and deliver a new community engagement program, offering employment, travel funding and space for their artistic practice alongside community-based work. Ahead of the Scottish Parliament elections, Scottish Labor leader Anas Sarwar has recently promised to explore a new artists’ payment, which will increase the income of artists and composers by up to 1,000 XNUMX to ensure a real living wage.

It is clear that unrestricted funding does not stifle innovation; it does. The Arts Foundation supports artists with unconditional relationships because we know that trust, time and independence are important and spark amazing creative endeavors. Such schemes support a fair wage by giving artists a guarantee to refuse low-paid work and negotiate contracts from a position of power. Worse, income security also increases access to the arts, supporting artists from working class and underrepresented backgrounds who are most likely to be excluded from the industry altogether.

The work of the Arts Foundation and these programs are not only about charities. They are about seeing art as work, and culture as a social good and a human right. Assignments go beyond individual artists. At a time when trust in public life is at risk, artists play an important role in helping us think, think and communicate, enriching education, health, public health and the economy. As a policy supplement, guaranteed income has real potential to address entrenched economic inequality, and there’s a compelling case for putting artists at the center of that effort.

America’s guaranteed income pioneers have done the hard work of proving the model. The question now for policy makers, philanthropists and cultural institutions on both sides of the Atlantic is whether we are willing to do something about it. If the UK is serious about cultural regeneration, we must invest in programs that allow artists not just to survive, but to build and, more importantly, sustain long-term, meaningful careers. Without structural change, we will continue to lose talented artists to the industry, diminishing the voices that shape our shared culture.

Philanthropy has an important role to play, but alone it will not solve systemic insecurity. At the Arts Foundation, we have ambitions to expand our work and welcome to be part of this solution, as providing unconditional funding to artists directly is no longer a niche field; it’s a bold, evidence-based starting point.

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