The Foyle Foundation has announced £18 million in funding for legacy projects of long-term benefit, national importance and strategic value, as it completes its 25 year grant giving journey.
By the end of 2025 the Foyle Foundation will have distributed more than £180 million to over 7,000 charities and schools across the UK, primarily in the fields of arts and learning. Funding has increased steadily year on year to respond to the needs of grantees more quickly and to a higher level than would have been possible without the planned 25 years spend down.
“In addition to an increased budget for our normal grant giving programmes in our final year of operation, the Foundation wished to make a range of strategic grants across the country which would be of national and regional importance and of long-term benefit to sector leaders. This would ensure an enduring legacy for the Foyle Foundation and make a long-lasting positive impact on the lives of young people and others and show imaginative ways to encourage philanthropy for those who have the ambition to support the arts and learning.”
David Hall, Chief Executive of the Foyle Foundation
The twelve legacy grants announced today are:
Recipient: The Poetry Society
Project: Foyle Young Poets of the Year Award
Grant: £500,000
The Foyle Young Poets of the Year Award, founded by the Poetry Society in 1998, has been heavily invested in and supported by the Foyle Foundation since 2001. Consequently, the Award has become internationally renowned as the leading poetry competition for young people aged 11 to 17 years, attracting over 17,000 entries last year. Its impact on the future lives of young poets has been transformational, with past award winners now at the forefront of British poetry, having gone onto win major adult prizes, appear in anthologies, publish solo collections, as well as developing careers in publishing, editing and teaching creative writing. The endowment grant of £500,000 will underpin the delivery of the Award for the next ten years from 2026 – 2036.
Recipient: Art Fund
Project: Mini Wonders – an Early Years Innovation in Museums programme and Teacher Art Pass: Digital Platform
Grant: £798,000
Mini Wonders – an Early Years Innovation in Museums programme, a partnership between Art Fund, Nesta and The Foyle Foundation on a major UK wide pilot supporting museums to engage children under five and their parents/caregivers, generating new research and learning that can be implemented at scale by museums across the UK in the long term. Following on from the pilot of the Teacher Art Pass, the Foundation is also funding the expansion and development of the scheme, specifically a new Digital Platform which will be available to all teachers across the UK to access free of charge. It will bring together key information and resources from across Art Fund’s network of 900+ museum partners into one easily accessible platform. It will provide a wealth of creative resources, information and guidance to enable teachers to access their local museums and embed museum learning within their teaching.
Recipient: British Library, Yorkshire
Project: Creation of new Learning Centre and Viewing Gallery, Boston Spa, Yorkshire
Grant: £1 million
The British Library’s transformation of its West Yorkshire site in Boston Spa will create state of the art storage facilities that will safeguard the collection for the next half a century and improve its impact on the environment, as well as building new capacity for the collection. The Foyle Foundation’s legacy grant of £1 million has added in the ability for visitors, schools and community groups to see behind the scenes and discover how 21st-century robotic technology powers each new journey of discovery at the Library. The Foyle Grant also enables a dedicated learning space to be created to deliver their world beating education programme for schools.
Recipient: Royal Welsh College of Music & Drama
Project: Redevelopment of the Cardiff Old Library as a new centre for arts and education
Grant: £2 million
The Royal Welsh College of Music & Drama is the national conservatoire of Wales. Established in 1949 to train future generations of professionals across the performing arts and related industries, it offers foundation, undergraduate and postgraduate degrees to over 900 students from 40 countries, taught by world-class tutors and visiting artists. The College is in the process of renovating the Old Library in Cardiff’s city centre to create a new accessible base for the performing arts, complete with space for public performance, exhibition and wide community use. Long-term the transformation of the Old Library will manifest the College’s commitment to embed the performing arts at the heart of contemporary society. It will also support the regeneration of the local area, expand the facilities for the College’s students and facilitate greater arts engagement for the people of South Wales and beyond.
Recipient: Sadler’s Wells Trust
Project: Creative Development Fund
Grant: £1.1 million
The Foyle Foundation is providing an expandable endowment as the lead donor for the Sadler’s Wells Creative Development Fund to support and provide long-term seed funding for new choreography, new commissions and adventurous creative projects by the global dance organisation, Sadler’s Wells. The ‘Foyle Studio’ at the new Sadler’s Wells East has been named in recognition of this grant and the Foundation’s long standing support for the internationally important dance organisation.
Recipient: Ulster Orchestra
Project: Creation of new permanent home for Ulster Orchestra in Belfast on the peace line
Grant: £1 million
Ulster Orchestra Society is Northern Ireland’s only professional Symphony Orchestra. The Foyle Foundation’s grant of £1 million will go towards the extensive redevelopment of Townsend Street Church on the peace line in Belfast to create the first permanent home for the Orchestra. The restored church will provide a rehearsal and events space, a music learning and community engagement hub, and a dedicated recording studio, enabling the Orchestra to expand its work and impact in the Belfast community and across the region.
Recipient: Edinburgh Festival Fringe Society
Project: Creation of first permanent base for the Fringe
Grant: £1 million
The Edinburgh Festival Fringe is the world’s largest arts festival, which takes place every August presenting over 3,750 shows, alongside 400 street performers and attended by around 780,000 people. The Edinburgh Festival Fringe Society is the charity that underpins the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. The Foyle Foundation’s £1 million grant will go towards the development of the Fringe Society’s new home, securing long-term sustainability of the Fringe Society and bringing together for the first time its operations in one centre, as well as providing the opportunity for a new publicly accessible space for artists and the community year-round. The new home will be located in the Southbridge Community Resource Centre, former Schoolhouse on Infirmary Street in Edinburgh’s Old Town.
Recipient: National Gallery
Project: Bicentenary Development
Grant: £2 million
To mark the National Gallery’s Bicentenary on 10th May 2024, it launched a year-long festival of art and a suite of building projects, known as NG200, in order to celebrate its history as the nation’s gallery and to serve the public for the 21st century. The Foyle Foundation’s grant supports the NG200 Welcome capital project and NG200 Programme nationwide. The Foyle Room has been named in celebration of this legacy grant and the long standing support of the Foyle Foundation.
Recipient: V&A
Project: Foyle Creative Centre, V&A East Storehouse
Grant: £2 million
A world first in size and scale, V&A East Storehouse presents over half a million works from every creative discipline. Opening on 31st May 2025, in a new purpose-built public space and working store designed by world-renowned architects Diller Scofidio+Renfro, taking over a section of the former London 2012 Olympics Media Centre in the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park, the warehouse-type space is designed to give unprecedented access to the V&A’s collections for the first time. Public access and creative skills development will be at the heart of the new building. The Foyle Creative Centre, encompassing two creative studios and two workshop spaces, will engage the public and students in real-world design, learning and making experiences.
Recipient: National Theatre
Project: Capital grant
Grant: £1.5 million
The National Theatre’s £125m fundraising campaign Stories Start Here, the most ambitious in its history, will raise funds for world-class theatre, nationwide education projects and urgent capital upgrades to ensure the future of the organisation, which has a global audience reach of 19 million. The campaign will ensure that millions of people continue to enjoy innovative, ambitious theatre made on the South Bank and will support the next generation of creatives to train at the National Theatre Skills Centre. The Foyle Foundation’s grant has kick started the redevelopment of unique backstage areas, some of which have not been updated in nearly 50 years since the theatre first opened in 1976. In recognition of this legacy grant and previous major support from the Foundation, the National Theatre has named its members’ room the Foyle Room.
Recipient: The Glasshouse International Centre for Music
Project: Foyle Music Centre at The Glasshouse, Gateshead
Grant: £2 million
The £2 million legacy grant is the lead gift in a major endowment campaign for The Glasshouse International Centre for Music, Gateshead in its 20th anniversary year, to improve and expand opportunities in music for everyone across the North East. This year, the charity will bring together all its music education and artist development activity within the Foyle Music Centre with the aim of reaching out to more young people across their four new music learning hot-spots (Carlisle, Sunderland, Darlington and Middlesbrough) increasing the number of places available, reducing financial barriers to learning, and supporting emerging professional musicians. The Foyle Music Centre will increase access to music education across genres and practices, from electronic to classical, for future generations.
Recipient: Britten Pears Arts
Project: Support of capital campaign, specifically to support energy efficiency and sustainability upgrades to the Britten Pears Building at Snape Maltings
Grant: £500K
The ageing Britten Pears building at Snape Maltings will undergo significant renovation to improve facilities and environmental impact. The building is Britten Pears Arts centre for training young musicians and singers at the start of their careers. The legacy grant is a lead gift to kick start their capital campaign for improvements. The Foyle Foyer celebrates this legacy grant and previous major Foyle support for Britten Pears Arts – the pioneering music, arts and heritage charity based on the Suffolk coast at two popular, historic visitor destinations: The Red House and Snape Maltings.
The twelve strategic grants announced today have a value of £15.4 million. Two further projects will be announced later this year bringing the total funding in 2025 to over £18 million: The additional funding will include a legacy project for school libraries following on from the Foyle School Library Scheme which is the best known of the Foundation’s major funding initiatives. Following research which showed a clear gap in library provision within schools, the scheme began in August 2009 and has awarded over £12 million in grants to more than 2000 individual schools, giving priority to state funded primary schools in areas of particular deprivation.
About The Foyle Foundation
The Foyle Foundation was established in 2000 to implement the will of the late Christina Foyle, who died in 1999 leaving most of her estate to charity. As an independent grant making trust the Foyle Foundation distributes grants to U.K. based charities (primarily arts and learning) and schools. The Foundation’s long planned spend down and closure takes place in December 2025 by when it will have distributed over £180 million in total, including a number of legacy projects with long-term benefit. foylefoundation.org.uk
