Trust-Based Funding Works. Why Are Artists Still Living in Precarity?

For emergent artists, the path into 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 must face an uncomfortable truth: our current funding model is failing creatives.

For over three decades, the Arts Foundation in the U.K. has supported artists at pivotal moments in their careers. Alumni, including choreographer Sir Wayne McGregor, novelist Ali Smith, theater director Rufus Norris, writer Alice Birch, filmmaker Asif Kapadia and painter Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, were supported not through tightly prescribed outcomes, but through trust: time, freedom and belief in the value of their practice and work. Many have since gone on to shape Britain’s cultural life in profound ways. Year after year, we have seen that when artists are given resources without strings attached, 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 unambiguous. While proof of concept alone doesn’t drive change, the economic and moral case for acting on it is just as urgent in the U.K., where artists and creatives sit at the heart of the creative economy, worth over £124 billion a year according to government figures. Yet too many are asked to generate public cultural value while their own financial security remains fragile.

In the United States, guaranteed income programs for artists have been independently evaluated with striking results. Springboard for the Arts, based in Saint Paul, Minnesota, runs one of the most established guaranteed income pilots for artists in the country. The program launched in 2021 alongside the City of St. Paul’s People’s Prosperity Pilot and has since expanded to reach 100 artists across Minnesota, 50 in Otter Tail County and 50 in the Frogtown/Rondo neighborhoods, sustained over five years. During the pilot, participants receive unrestricted monthly payments of $500 per month and free financial, student loan debt and housing counseling delivered through LSS Financial Counseling. Evaluated in partnership with the University of Pennsylvania’s Center for Guaranteed Income Research, the program’s findings are clear: when artists can concentrate on their work, the benefits are felt widely by families and communities alike.

Such pilots gained momentum in 2022, with Creatives Rebuild New York providing 2,400 artists across New York State with regular, no-strings-attached income of $1,000 a month over 18 months, resulting in reduced financial stress, improved mental health and greater housing stability. Similarly, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts ran a comparable 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 Black, Latinx, Asian and LGBTQ+ communities. It found that predictable income enabled artists to spend more time on creative work and sustain long-term practice.

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

Despite this growing body of international evidence, the U.K.’s own funding landscape has been slow to respond. Public funding has become increasingly prescriptive, competitive, short-term and project-based, rewarding an 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 “exposure” or future opportunity. Rising rents and living costs, alongside the erosion of affordable studio space, hit artists especially hard and mean that talented artists are facing significant barriers before their practice has had time to mature and flourish. For many, survival depends on unpaid labor, personal debt or family support—a system that has historically, and quietly continues to, exclude those without financial safety nets. This is not only unjust; 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 defined by intermittent work, long unpaid gaps and chronic underinvestment. Fair pay must be the baseline, not the ceiling. Without wider income security, even fairly paid work sits within an economy that remains fundamentally precarious.

These concerns are not new, nor are they confined to independent artists themselves, but they have recently been formally acknowledged at the policy level. The recent independent review of the national funding body Arts Council England, chaired by Baroness Hodge, acknowledged that artists are the foundation of the cultural sector and called for a rebalancing of investment away from buildings and institutions alone and toward 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 career-long support. The ambition is significant, 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 into proving 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 venues, they leave artists—whose labor animates these institutions—largely outside the frame of central cultural policy.

Alongside these broader policy developments, a quieter shift is underway. Small but significant experiments have begun 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 outputs or constant application cycles. In Teesside, Artist of the Year, funded through the U.K. Shared Prosperity Fund and delivered by the Tees Valley Mayor and Combined Authority, provides one artist annually 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 appointing three Embedded Artists on 17-month salaried contracts to develop and deliver a new community engagement program, offering employed status, a travel allowance and space for their own creative practice alongside the community-facing work. In the run-up to the Scottish Parliament election, Scottish Labour leader Anas Sarwar recently pledged to pilot a new payment for artists, which would top up the incomes of up to 1,000 artists and creatives to ensure a real living wage.

It’s clear that unrestricted funding does not stifle creativity; it enables it. The Arts Foundation supports artists with unconditional fellowships because we know that trust, time and autonomy matter and elicit extraordinary creative endeavors. Such schemes complement fair pay by giving artists the security to refuse 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 the most likely to be forced out of the field entirely.

The work of the Arts Foundation and these initiatives is not solely about charity. They are about recognizing artistic work as 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 precarious, 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 holds genuine potential for addressing entrenched economic inequality, and there is a compelling case for placing 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 policymakers, philanthropists and cultural institutions on both sides of the Atlantic is whether we are willing to act on it. If the U.K. is serious about cultural renewal, we must invest in systems that allow artists not just to survive, but to build and, critically, sustain long-term, meaningful careers. Without structural change, we will continue to lose talented artists from the sector, narrowing whose voices shape our shared culture.

Philanthropy has a significant role to play, but alone cannot solve systemic precarity. At the Arts Foundation, we have ambitions to grow our work and welcome being a part of this solution, since providing unconditional funding to artists directly is no longer a niche field; it is a bold, evidence-backed place to start.

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