CFAs: Small Grants Scheme to support Participatory Arts Projects (UK)

Theme

• ‘Comfort & Disturb’ 
  • The Mental Health Foundation’s annual festival takes place across Scotland and covers all artforms. SMHAF aims to provide a platform for everyone to create and share art inspired by mental health and explore how the arts and creativity can help everyone to have better mental health.
  • The programme will be supported by Multi-Year Funding from Creative Scotland for the first time from April 2025 to March 2028, giving us welcome stability and enabling us to continue to present innovative, diverse, and accessible arts and mental health events across Scotland.
  • The 2025 festival theme, Comfort and Disturb, references the famous Cesar A Cruz quote about art as activism, the idea that “art should comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable”. It is a simple expression of the power of art both to challenge and to console, often having a transformative effect on people and societies. Art does not have to be activism, of course. It can be a source of comfort for everyone and anyone who wants it. Art can also disturb with no agenda other than creating an emotional reaction.
  • Being creative can involve choosing whether to comfort or disturb. If art leans too heavily towards comfort it can sometimes feel cloying and sentimental. But if it is too disturbing it can be harmful to the mental health. Finding the right balance is a creative challenge. Art is often most effective when it is comforting and disturbing at the same time.

Funding Information

• With funding from the Baring Foundation and Creative Scotland, they are offering grants of between £750 and £1,250 to support regional participatory arts projects in areas currently underrepresented in the SMHAF programme.

Geographic Focus

• This year, they will have a strategic focus on Dundee, Aberdeen, and towns and rural areas across Scotland. The fund will support between six and eight projects overall.

Eligibility Criteria

• The SMHAF Regional Participatory Arts Fund is open to individual artists, organisations, or artists working in partnership with an organisation, but the project must be led by a named artist working across any artform (including, but not limited to, music, film, writing, visual art, theatre and dance).
• By ‘Participatory Arts’ they mean projects in which the audience or community is actively involved in the creative process, becoming co-creators alongside artists. Participatory arts projects involve collaboration and shared decision-making, and should empower those taking part to express themselves creatively with guidance from a lead artist.
• Projects should, as much as possible, respond to the festival theme, ‘Comfort & Disturb’. One of the things they want to explore with this theme is the various ways in which art can comfort and disturb, often at the same time, and the challenges involved in finding a balance between the two.
• In addition to prioritising applications from Dundee, Aberdeen, and towns and rural areas across Scotland, proposals should also directly engage people with experience of mental health problems or who are are most at risk of experiencing poor mental health. These include families and young people at elevated risk, refugees and asylum seekers, people living with long term conditions, and people from racialised communities. Where relevant, they expect applicants to consider safeguarding for themselves, audiences, and anyone else involved in the creative process, particularly when proposing to work with challenging material.
• The fund can support both new projects and ongoing work. They anticipate supporting projects across a range of regional areas and communities.

For more information, visit Scottish Mental Health Arts Festival.