About Us
Future Arts Centres is a national network of more than 180 arts centres, working together to champion the unique role these creative spaces play at the heart of their communities.
We connect and support leaders across the UK to share practice, spark innovation, and influence policy, ensuring arts centres remain vital, inclusive, and resilient. Rooted in local life but united in vision, we believe arts centres are essential civic spaces where creativity and communities meet, shaping a future where culture is for everyone.
Our objectives
Champion arts centres as essential civic and cultural spaces, rooted in their communities and responsive to local need.
Support leaders and organisations through collaboration, peer learning, and the sharing of best practice.
Foster innovation and creativity by encouraging new ideas, models, and partnerships across the sector.
Influence policy and decision-making to secure recognition, investment, and long-term sustainability for arts centres.
Promote inclusion and accessibility, ensuring that arts centres welcome and represent the diversity of the communities they serve.
Strengthen resilience and sustainability so that arts centres can thrive in a changing social, cultural, and economic landscape.
Key Principles
Future Arts Centres operates within a set of key principles that encapsulate our belief that arts centres:
- provide outstanding artistic experiences
maximise social impact and community cohesion through the breadth of their activities and depth of engagement - are ‘businesses’ making significant contributions to the economy
- drive economic growth by acting as incubators for individual artists and entrepreneurs and through cultural SME’s, supporting them with advice and training to establish their own enterprises
- contribute to regeneration and growth through their local economic impact and by providing cultural place-making
- provide ‘safe houses’ for the development of artists and companies, encouraging and supporting artistic experimentation and development
- drive innovation within the industry, with business models that enable artistic risk-taking
- provide safe and stimulating environments for the creative development of children and young people
History
Future Arts Centres began in 2013 as a peer support group of arts centre leaders who came together to share challenges, ideas, and ambitions. Born out of a spirit of mutual support, the network quickly became a trusted space for collaboration, where leaders could learn from one another and advocate collectively for the role of arts centres in civic life. That ethos of peer support and shared learning continues to underpin everything we do today.
Over the past decade, Future Arts Centres has grown into a national network, championing the essential role of arts centres as creative, community-led spaces at the heart of local life. We have led major national commissions, influenced cultural policy, and supported arts centres in adapting to a rapidly changing world.
In April 2023, Future Arts Centres became an independent registered company and secured funding from Arts Council England as an Investment Principles Support Organisation (IPSO). This marked an important step in strengthening the network’s capacity to support and advocate for arts centres across the country, while staying true to our founding values of openness, generosity, and collaboration.
