For emerging artists, the path to a sustainable career has rarely felt narrower. 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 being pushed out of the industry. If we want a thriving cultural life, we have to face an uncomfortable truth: our current funding model is failing creativity.
For more than three decades, Arts Foundation UK has supported artists at key moments in their careers. Alumni, including choreographer Sir Wayne McGregornovelist Ali Smiththeater director Rufus Norriswriter Alice Birchdirector Asif Kapadia and painter Lynette Yiadom-Best of Lynettewere sustained not through hard-wired results, but through faith: time, freedom, and belief in the value of their practice and work. Many of them have gone on to shape Britain’s cultural life in profound ways. Year after year, we’ve seen that when artists are given wireless resources, they take risks, deepen their practice, and create work that resonates far beyond the studio. This principle of trust remains largely absent from the funding landscape that artists must navigate.
American organizations have spent years building an evidence base for this principle, and the results are mixed. While proof of concept alone doesn’t drive change, the economic and moral case for acting on it is just as pressing in the UK, where artists and creators lie at the heart of the creative economy. worth over £124 billion a year according to government figures. However, many people are asked 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 surprising results. Springboard for the Arts, based in Saint Paul, Minnesota, runs one of the most established pilots with guaranteed income for artists in the country. The program began in 2021 in conjunction with the City of St. Louis People’s Prosperity Pilot. During the pilot, participants receive unlimited monthly payments of $500 per month and free financial debt, student loan and housing counseling provided through LSS Financial Counseling. Evaluated in partnership with the University of Pennsylvania’s Guaranteed Income Research Center, the program’s findings are clear: when artists can focus on their work, the benefits are felt widely by families and communities.
Such pilots gained momentum in 2022, with Creators rebuild New York providing 2,400 artists across New York State with a regular, unrelated income of $1,000 per month over 18 months, resulting in reduced financial stress, improved mental health, and greater housing stability. Similarly, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts led a comparable initiative in San Francisco in 2021 in partnership with the city, supporting 60 artists who received $1,000 per month for 18 months, with recipients selected through six community organizations representing historically underserved groups, including Black, Latino, Asian, and LGBTQ+ communities. He found that predictable income enabled artists to spend more time on creative work and sustain the practice long-term.
Similar results have been seen in Ireland, where the government Basic income for the arts The scheme supports around 2,000 artists and creative workers on €325 per week. What started as a pilot has since become a historic cultural policy. At the end of 2025, the Irish Government confirmed its intention to expand and integrate the scheme beyond its initial pilot phase, with continuous public funding ensured. Evaluations show that participants spend more time on creative work, relying less on well-being support and reporting improved well-being, with over 100 million euros in estimated social and economic benefits.
Despite this growing body of international evidence, the UK’s own 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. Too often, artists are expected to accept low fees or unpaid development time in exchange for future “exposure” or opportunity. Rising rents and living costs, along with the erosion of affordable studio space, hits artists particularly hard and means that talented artists are facing significant barriers before their practice has had time to mature and flourish. For many, survival depends on unpaid work, personal debt or family support – a system that has historically and silently continued to exclude 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, the fair wage alone cannot fix a system defined by intermittent work, long unpaid gaps and chronic under-investment. A fair wage should be the floor, not the ceiling. Without broader income security, even well-paid work remains within an economy that remains fundamentally insecure.
These concerns are not new, nor are they limited to independent artists themselves, but recently they have been officially acknowledged at the policy level. The latest independent review of national funding body Arts Council England, chaired by Baroness Hodgerecognized 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 careers support. Ambition is important, but the structural change it promises is still in design, and artists navigating the sector today must do so within a system that has yet to catch up. American organizations are already years to prove what works.
Similarly, recent announcements from the Department for Culture, Media and Sport have focused on much-needed investment in museums and cultural infrastructure. While these interventions are vital to protect collections and environments, they leave artists – whose work animates these institutions – largely outside the framework of central cultural policy.
Alongside these broader policy developments, a quieter shift is underway. Small but significant experiments are beginning to point toward alternative approaches. In Gloucester, arts organization Strike A Light has employed artists on salaried contracts for two and a half years, offering stability without fixed results or continuous application cycles. In Teesside, Artist of the Yearfunded by the UK’s Common Prosperity Fund and delivered by Tees Valley Mayor and Combined Authority, it provides an artist each year with a guaranteed income, workspace 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 provided artists with regular income support and found measurable improvements in financial stability, well-being and creative focus. Similarly, Cove Park is naming three Embedded artists on 17-month salary contracts to develop and deliver a new community engagement programme, offering employee status, a travel allowance and space for their creative practice alongside community work. On the eve of the Scottish Parliament elections, the Scottish Labor leader Anas Sarwar recently vowed to pilot a new payment for artistswhich would augment the income of up to 1,000 artists and creators to provide a real living wage.
Clearly, unlimited funding does not stifle creativity; enables it. Arts Foundation supports artists with unconditional fellowship because we know that trust, time and autonomy matter and drive extraordinary creative endeavors. Such schemes complement fair pay by giving artists the confidence to turn down underpaid work and negotiate contracts from a position of strength. Crucially, income security also widens access to the arts, supporting artists from working class and underrepresented backgrounds who are currently more likely to be forced out of the field altogether.
The work of the Arts Foundation and these initiatives is not just about charity. They are related to the recognition of the artistic work as a work, and culture as a public good and human right. The stakes extend beyond individual artists. At a time when trust in public life is uncertain, artists play a vital role in helping us reflect, imagine and connect, enriching education, health, civic life and the economy. As a policy lever, guaranteed income has real potential for addressing entrenched economic inequality, and there is a compelling case for putting artists at the center of this effort.
America’s guaranteed income pioneers have done the hard work to prove the model. The question now for policymakers, philanthropists and cultural institutions on both sides of the Atlantic is whether we are willing to act on it. If the UK is serious about cultural renewal, we need to invest in systems that allow artists not just to survive, but to build and, critically, sustain long-term and meaningful careers. Without structural change, we will continue to lose talented artists from the sector, narrowing the voices whose voices shape our shared culture.
Philanthropy has an important role to play, but alone cannot solve systemic insecurity. At the Arts Foundation, we have ambitions to grow our work and welcome being part of this solution, as providing unconditional funding to artists directly is no longer a niche area; it’s a bold, evidence-backed place to start.
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