The arts are one of the original five "good causes" which benefit from the National Lottery.
Which lottery distributors provide money to the arts?
Arts Council England is the national development agency for the arts in England. It is the main body responsible for distributing public money from Government and the lottery to artists and arts organisations.
Since the beginning of the National Lottery, Arts Council England has allocated almost £1.5 billion to over 15,000 projects.
The Arts Council has opened up lottery funding to more, and smaller, arts organisations by making it easier to apply, setting low minimum grants and broadening the scope of what the funding can be used for.
The Arts Council's lottery-funded Arts Capital Programme provides grants of between £100,000 and £5million for a range of projects, including new buildings for the arts, improvements to existing arts buildings and buying new equipment and technology.
The Arts Capital Programme has two planned spending rounds between 2000/01 and 2006/07. The first round took place in early 2001 and resulted in 61 projects being admitted to the programme. Applications for the second round closed on 13 October 2003.
The
Heritage Lottery Fund uses lottery money to give grants to support a wide range of projects involving the local, regional and national heritage of the UK. It supports arts projects that increase access to, understanding of, or participation in heritage.
Awards for All is a joint distributor lottery scheme that is aimed at local communities. It provides small grants of between £500 and £5000 for small groups involved in arts, sports, heritage and charity activities.
The National Lottery Act 1998 established
NESTA - the National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts - with aims to "support and promote talent, innovation and creativity" in those fields. NESTA's funding is concentrated directly at people, groups and projects, rather than on revenue or capital funding of organisations.
