Applying for funding, residencies, commissions and exhibitions is a regular part of most artists’ working lives. Each opportunity asks you to look at your practice through a particular lens – to interpret the brief, reflect on your experience, and decide how best to communicate who you are and what you do.
Applications for socially engaged practice – whether workshops, participatory commissions, projects with communities, children, young people, families or vulnerable groups – are no different. Yet this aspect of professional practice is rarely taught. Many artists develop these skills out of necessity, learning by doing, often in isolation.
The toolkit
As commissioners who have read and supported hundreds of applications, we’ve noticed recurring challenges as well as powerful approaches. This toolkit aims to distil that knowledge: offering guidance on what commissioners are looking for, highlighting areas where applications can often be strengthened, and suggesting the kinds of questions worth asking at the outset. It considers a range of elements within an application process, not everything will be relevant for you, or for every expression of interest.
We hope it provides a useful resource to support artists with reassurance, additional tools and ideas to effectively and confidently articulate their practice and support the wider field of social practice.
The opportunity and key considerations
Before you apply
Be confident in your ability to interrogate the opportunity and the process – is anything missing in the brief? Do you need to contact the commissioner with additional or clarifying questions?
Outcome-driven and process-driven approaches
The opportunity that you’re applying for may explicitly or implicitly ask for a specific approach. For example:
- Outcome-driven: Schools or formal education settings may be motivated by a specific outcome, final result, or expected deliverable – such as an assembly performance, a mural, installation, book or film. This may be more important to them than the process and methods by which it comes about.
- Process-driven: An arts organisation with project funding may be more flexible in not specifying an outcome, theme, medium or output. The experience and impact may be more important than defining the final ‘deliverable’. However, the setting doesn’t always dictate the approach – a school might welcome process-driven work, for example. If the application is unclear, contact them to ask.
Examine the language used in the brief to clarify what the commissioners are looking for. This could be ‘deliver’ or ‘outcome’ in relation to fixed outputs, compared with ‘exploration’ or ‘co-creation’ for more open ones.
The timing of the opportunity often guides the extent of the project’s co-creation or project delivery. A timeline with one or two months of experimentation may suggest a process-driven approach. Or a more immediate start date may imply that the commissioner needs something more pre-planned and ‘ready to go’.
Suggesting a process-driven approach, including co-creation with participants, can often be supported by creating a visual picture of what we can expect. It can be useful to outline specific methods, if appropriate. For example, Open Forum Theatre, Asset-Based Community Development, Participatory Action Research, Arts-based Critical Pedagogy and trauma-informed approaches.
It’s also good to include what activities or tools you will bring that will facilitate a process-driven approach and clear examples you can provide of previous work that demonstrates this – what worked?
Partnerships & collaboration
Are the intended participants, local or community connections or networks identified in the brief? Are these pre-existing relationships or new ones? Are you expected to identify and develop relationships yourself?
Does the commissioner have appropriate leads, and will they support in this area if they have a pre-existing relationship? Can they support an asset-based as opposed to a deficit-based approach to community engagement? This is really helpful to understand, so you can factor it into your process.
You may not have direct experience previously working with a specific community, but you can draw on examples which may be comparable in, for example, local context, community strengths and barriers to access.
Show that you understand the commissioner’s context, both internal scale, staff support, the delivery site and local context.
Demonstrate how you manage positive and effective communication and relationships with the commissioner, partners and participants.
Tailor your response to the organisation you’re applying to – when someone is genuinely engaged with an organisation’s values and approach it always has a positive impact. Research the organisation’s previous projects, their vision or mission, and articulate why you are a good fit to collaborate with them.
It’s important to demonstrate your genuine interest in a commission or role – this really shines through on applications when it’s authentic.
Access
What experience do you have in meeting access requirements? For example, working with interpreters, making room and time for prayer, accounting for various energy levels or mixed-ability groups or creating access riders?
Do you have appropriate, specific experience working with SEND, disabled people or examples of behavioural challenges?
Do you have experience or examples of working with particularly vulnerable groups? For example, refugees, asylum seekers, care-experienced children?
Do you bring your own lived experience to your socially engaged practice? Does it feel appropriate to share this with the commissioner? How might it support community engagement? What are your own access needs as a facilitator? There is no obligation to share personal information; it is just something to consider if it feels appropriate to your practice and the opportunity. See the ‘Reflections on lived experience’ section for further considerations.
If the timeline is tight, how can you demonstrate that you develop relationships and trust rapidly with participants?
Practical delivery logistics
If there are unfixed elements or uncertainty in the brief, then ask why. If it’s the nature of the process-driven programme, then communicate your adaptability to different spaces, for example, indoor/outdoor, rural/urban, and low-resource settings.
Contingency planning – what happens if a key part of the plan can’t go ahead?
Communicating within your application
Presenting your work/portfolio
Balance your portfolio between relevant artworks or a body of work from your personal artistic practice – alongside your social practice documentation of workshops, projects, or programmes.
Not being able to share images of participants because of safeguarding, privacy and consent, doesn’t exclude you from sharing rich and visual content of your previous projects.
You can:
- Share non-identifiable images of hands and arms doing things or the backs of heads.
- Take in-progress images of the space setup before, during and the creations made afterwards.
- Use qualitative feedback within your portfolio with one or two short quotes from participants or commissioners that demonstrate the experience or impact of your work.
If appropriate to your work, it’s helpful to demonstrate your breadth of settings you have experience with – for example, formal education, informal learning settings, community, statutory or clinical spaces.
Language
Be as clear and precise as possible; abstract language and buzz words can often be difficult to navigate, whilst ensuring your passion or politics shine through.
Applications are also about communicating how you can connect and collaborate as an artist, and whether you share the commissioning organisation’s values and principles.
Reflections on lived experiences
Sharing reflections of your own lived experiences is, of course, a personal decision to take. To help make an informed decision, here are some considerations:
- Lived experiences often can have far more weight compared with traditional and formal educational routes into art. These should be validated, understood and held within social practice contexts.
- Give specific examples from previous projects where lived experiences enabled connection and development with participants in social practice work – this is always enriching and offers a refreshing entry point by which to understand artists’ work with communities.
- Respect privacy, consent and confidentiality around challenging lived experiences
- Consider how it may be received by others – would it be appropriate to add a trigger warning or content notice?
- Ask yourself whether sharing is an asset to applications? Is it contextually relevant? Impactful? Worth drawing from as an example?
Project management
Funding and budgeting considerations
Ensure the budget aligns with your vision, the commissioner’s priorities and the practical requirements such as materials, documentation and access needs. Demonstrate value for money without underselling your time and expertise.
Ensure that you are comfortable with the fees available. If not, consider whether it is the right application for you.
Mention if you can bring in external match-funding or in-kind support.
Professional practice
It can be useful to include details of your insurance, DBS check (see below), contracts, and professional memberships in your application.
How does this opportunity contribute to your own practice and career? What excites you professionally about the opportunity, and why does it feel timely for you to undertake now?
Risk management and safeguarding
Will you need to produce or contribute to risk assessments for participants, spaces, and materials, or will the commissioner manage this?
A DBS check is an official check of a person’s criminal history, including spent/unspent convictions, cautions, and warnings. It is always required when working directly with children and young people or vulnerable adults, and is best practice in many other contexts too. Having entries on your record shouldn’t be a barrier to applying, unless you have convictions explicitly banning you from working with certain groups. Be open and honest, and have a conversation with the commissioners beforehand if you think something may be flagged – it’s always better to be proactive and have a conversation.
It can be useful to think about safeguarding processes beyond DBS checks in advance of a project. Such as how you respond to disclosures, escalation routes, working with chaperones, support workers or interpreters. This may be more relevant for an interview rather than the application stage, depending on the commission.
Documentation and storytelling
Is documentation an important part of the project to factor in? Or is this covered by the commissioner or organisation separately?
It may not always be appropriate to work with a photographer, so consider different ways to capture and communicate the process for funders, partners, or the public – for example: zines, blogs, short films, interviews, Q&As or focus groups.
How can you ensure that content is accessible for all participants – this can include large print, translations and alternative formats.
Work with the commissioner’s process to ensure data protection and consent for images and recordings are covered.
Evaluation and impact
Does the brief outline the evaluation process and how this will be undertaken? It’s worth asking if it’s unclear, especially for a long-term or significant piece of work. Sometimes financial instalments are tied to certain deliverables.
How will you measure and evidence impact, both qualitative – such as capturing the experience and quotes – and quantitative, such as measuring numbers reached and demographics.
Thinking about legacy: how the work will continue or have ripple effects after the project ends?
Conclusion
Every application is an opportunity to reflect on your practice, connect with organisations whose values align with yours, and articulate the unique perspective you bring to socially engaged work. While the process can feel daunting, remember that commissioners want to find the right artist – they’re looking for authentic voices, thoughtful approaches, and practitioners who genuinely care about the communities they work with.
Not every opportunity will be the right fit, and that’s okay. The skills you develop through applying – clarifying your methods, understanding your strengths, learning to communicate your practice – serve you far beyond any single commission. We hope this toolkit offers you practical support and encouragement as you navigate applications.
