Weston Culture Fund support for National Glass Centre
We are very pleased to announce a grant of £150,970 from the Garfield Weston Foundation’s Weston Culture Fund. This important grant will ensure that Sunderland Culture can continue to deliver the benefits of art, creativity and culture to the communities of Sunderland.
The Garfield Weston Foundation established the Weston Culture Fund to support the UK’s cultural sector so audiences continue to be inspired by world-class culture. Through the Weston Culture Fund, Garfield Weston Foundation has granted over £30 million to more than 100 organisations across the UK, and we are honoured to be awarded a grant.
Support from the Weston Culture Fund will allow us to invest into National Glass Centre’s arts programme supporting new exhibitions, family activities and learning programme. It will help us to build back confidence after the city’s cultural venues have been closed for so much of the last 12 months and help us to support and encourage our visitors to return. At the same time it will enable us to invest in future fundraising and income generation to ensure that we can continue to work with people in the city into the future.
Chief Executive of Sunderland Culture, Keith Merrin, said:
“We are very grateful to the trustees of the Garfield Weston Foundation for making this fantastic and much needed investment into Sunderland. National Glass Centre, along with the other cultural venues in the city, is much loved and even when closed has continued to provide creative activities and experiences for people of all ages through a variety of other means. As we start to move towards a time when we might reopen we must now turn our attention to the future and rebuilding our programmes and audiences and this grant is a huge support in doing that.”
Director of Garfield Weston Foundation, Philippa Charles, said:
“Our cultural sector is at the heart of our local communities providing not only entertainment but education and inspiration for many. Our Trustees were impressed by the entrepreneurial spirit shown across the arts in response to Covid-19 and it was a privilege to hear what organisations had been doing to not only survive but also to reinvent the way they reach audiences. What really stood out was the level of collaboration and support they had for each other and the determination to keep going, despite the increasingly difficult situation.
We all want and need our cultural sector to thrive and, if anything, our time away from the arts has shown just how important they are to us – bringing much needed pleasure and enrichment to our lives. Arts organisations are desperate to re-open and get back to what they do best, and we hope that this new funding will help many of them do exactly that.”
