Icon Theatre has received a major four-year grant from Esmée Fairbairn Foundation to strengthen its work with communities and share learning from its co-created theatre-making practice.
The £220,000 unrestricted core grant, awarded through Esmée Fairbairn Foundation’s Creative, Confident Communities aim, will support Icon over the next four years to deepen its approaches to co-creation and shared decision-making, while building the capacity and partnerships needed to extend the reach and impact of its work.
Icon Theatre is known for co-creating theatre with and for communities, bringing local stories, lived experience and urgent questions of social justice together through ambitious public productions. Recent work includes Ghost Ships, created with partners including Medway African and Caribbean Association, Sahara Foundation, ZooNation: The Kate Prince Company, Amina Khayyam Dance Company and The Historic Dockyard Chatham, which explored overlooked histories of race, empire and migration at Chatham Dockyard; and The House That Floated Away, developed with Sheppey communities and partners including Sheppey Matters, Oasis Community Hub and Sheppey Sailing Club, which uses theatre to explore climate justice. These works are rooted in the places they come from, while speaking to wider questions of identity, belonging, justice and change.
Nancy Hirst, Artistic Director of Icon Theatre, said:
“This support is an important moment for Icon Theatre. It recognises the value of long-term creative work with our local communities; the kind of work that depends on trust, listening, relationships and time. It also gives us space to strengthen our practice and look carefully at how community involvement works over time. We know that structures such as community panels only remain meaningful if they can adapt, if people can see how their voices shape real decisions, and if they are supported by genuine relationships. Over the next four years, we want to learn from communities and other organisations, test what is sustainable, and share what we have learned from more than 20 years of making theatre in this way.”
Daniel King, Executive Director of Icon Theatre, said:
“Flexible, long-term core funding is transformative for an organisation like Icon Theatre. It allows us to move beyond short-term project delivery and invest in the relationships, learning and organisational capacity that make our work meaningful and sustainable. It also supports us to think carefully and ambitiously about how locally rooted practice can have wider relevance and impact. We’re hugely grateful to Esmée Fairbairn Foundation for recognising the value of this work and supporting Icon at such an important stage in our development.”
Esmée Fairbairn Foundation’s Creative, Confident Communities aim supports work that strengthens communities and enables local people to play a greater role in shaping the places where they live. Icon’s grant sits within the Foundation’s community-led art and creativity priority.
We’ll share more about the work as it develops over the coming months and years.