The Cultural Investment Fund was designed to seed fund cultural initiatives through an open call, grant-making process. It was a collaborative effort that saw the National Portfolio Organisations (NPOs) in the city pool budgets and jointly commission activity that aligned with the strategic objectives set out in the Culture Plan.
Between 2020 and 2022, the two rounds of call outs supported 08 creatives and cultural organisations by funding time and opportunity for testing new ideas and developing concepts that would help improve and advance the creative and cultural sector.
The CIF programme valued the process as much as the output so this funding gave them time to think, test, research and pilot with the intention that each proposal could generate a range of shared learning that could be disseminated to the cultural sector for others to learn from and adopt best practices.