Afield aims to address a funding gap in the arts by providing grants to artists in financial hardship or on low incomes, whose research contributes towards ecological knowledge and justice.

Afield's art programme aims to:

• Provide career and development support for artists who have been structurally disadvantaged in arts funding, and to promote equity and plurality in arts research
• Value and support the intrinsic value of artist contributions to ecological justice
• Promote ecological frameworks that foreground care, interdependency and connection, imagination and repair

We seek to fund artist research that might include:

• New knowledge, frameworks and paradigms that disrupt and offer alternatives to current exploitative models
• Direct action or intervention
• Socially engaged learning, organising and solidarity-building
• Speculation, reimagining, and world-building
• More than human-perspectives

We recognise that the current funding system for artists is broken and we aim to be a fair and transparent funder, creating an application process that does not overburden applicants. Initially we will trial an open call approach, awarding grants of up to £30,000 for projects of up to three years.

We do not make our grants conditional on achieving predetermined outputs and outcomes, and we seek a collaborative, learning-based relationship with the artists we support. We are particularly interested in proposals from global majority artists, LGBTQIA+ artists, disabled artists or artists experiencing chronic illness. Our fund is open to all ages, art disciplines and points in career.