Westfield East Bank Creative Futures Fund is an award-winning, innovative five-year programme that invested £10 million into the local communities of Newham, Tower Hamlets, Hackney and Waltham Forest, supported by retail destination Westfield Stratford City.
This flagship project provided new jobs, learning, training, and educational programmes across the arts, culture, innovation, public realm and creative placemaking.
The programme aimed to transform and catalyse the lives and careers of people in East London by putting funding, resources and support straight into local people’s hands.
We delivered the following:
Each year, we evolved the programme’s design with feedback from our impact evaluation and our ever-growing capacity building network.
Due to this, the application process for successive years was continually modified to ensure the outcomes and impact have a stronger focus on area needs and take a participatory awarding approach.
COLLABORATE: SAFER SPACES Commission offers the opportunity for four teams to receive support and funding to develop collaborative ideas around the theme of ‘Safer Spaces’, as part of the Westfield East Bank Creative Futures Fund, supported by Westfield Stratford City, and co-funded by Foundation for Future London.
Four shortlisted teams will receive up to £50k each in flexible funding, part of which will be a development grant. The commission will provide the time and space to develop, test and embed collaborative work alongside partners, with wraparound co-designed support across each stage of programme development. Teams will work in partnership with Foundation for Future London throughout this process, developing sustainable collaborative approaches together, supporting project development away from the restrictions of rigid applications.
In 2024, we launched a new Empowering Safer Spaces campaign, inviting young people, artists, creatives, community groups and others in East London to take part in a conversation about what ‘Safer Spaces’ mean to East London’s under-resourced and marginalised communities. The campaign has included community consultation, an FOI request to London borough councils, a young people’s language workshop, a consumer survey and a panel event to share lessons learned and support networking.
In response to feedback and input from our grantees, our Westfield East Bank Creative Futures Fund Community Grant Panel and our Empowering Safer Spaces consultation, we are now seeking to commission new sustainable partner collaborations across East London to support more connected responses to this work.
At Foundation for Future London, we work to empower East London communities. A key part of this work has been supporting collaborations, with equitable partnership as a core criterion across the Westfield East Bank Creative Futures Fund.
This new round of commissions goes further by providing flexible funding and wrap-around support to organisations and networks, helping them deepen the impact and resilience of their collaborative work.
For Year 5 of our Westfield East Bank Creative Futures Fund, we are once again hosting a Capacity Building Programme, in partnership with award-winning social entrepreneur Lisa Stepanovic MBE.
The Foundation aims to make the fund as accessible as possible. If you haven’t signed up for the Capacity Building Programme, this popular programme is free for all new and previous applicants. It can make a significant difference for applicants in terms of application advice, practical support, and sharing of best practices.
The programme offers free workshops and a WhatsApp network and is open to anyone living, working or studying in Hackney, Newham, Tower Hamlets or Waltham Forest.
We encourage you to join this programme by emailing capacitybuilding.ffl@outlook.com
All events are free and open to individuals, organisations and businesses working and living across the local communities in the London Boroughs of Hackney, Newham, Tower Hamlets and Waltham Forest. See all our events on Eventbrite
For access support please contact grants@future.london
We have easy-to-read versions of our Guidance Notes on our grant scheme pages.
To find out our funding news and opportunities, please sign up for our newsletter: http://eepurl.com/gF6X3z.
For all four of the community grants schemes, at the heart of your project, there must be a core commitment to one or more of the following:
We appreciate these four overarching areas are a broad spectrum, so to aid understanding of outcomes expected through the grants, we have developed a user-centred process.
Outcomes are the project’s short, medium or long-term goals that will lead to a meaningful impact for communities in the local boroughs. Applicants will be asked to identify a set number of outcomes that their project will achieve. The number of outcomes expected will be based on the grant scheme you are applying for.
We have provided a list of 13 short, medium and long-term outcomes to be selected.
| Short Term Outcomes | Medium/Long Term Outcomes |
|---|---|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
If you are a Westfield East Bank Creative Futures Fund grantee, we have a Marketing and Press Guidance section, which has further information and download links for logos.
Download our WEBCFF Impact Framework, co-designed by the Fund’s grantees.
Watch our latest film featuring our Year 2 grantees Eastside, Loop Labs and True Cadence.
The film was produced and directed by Chris Baker with Editor Will Cole and Colourist Harvey Gibson.
In December 2023, we awarded a total of £560,000 to 26 projects.
This includes:
In January 2023, we awarded a total of £668,711 to 37 projects.
This includes:
In 2022, we awarded £786k to 11 Capital Grant Scheme projects.
Year 2 of the Westfield East Bank Creative Futures Fund saw the following grants awarded:
The Fund awarded a total of £1,351,194 to 82 community projects from the Fund’s community strand, consisting of the Small, Medium, Large and Capital Grant Schemes.
Year 2 was designed with evaluation and feedback from Year 1 grantees to ensure that the process is accessible, transparent and allows applicants to make informed decisions, follow a simple applications process and gain additional support when needed.
Year 1 of the Westfield East Bank Creative Futures Fund saw the following grants awarded:
The Fund awarded £660,000 to 36 community projects from the Small, Medium and Large Grant Scheme, benefiting over 7,000 people.
