Making Toynbee Studios greener and more inclusive
We’re thrilled to announce that we’ve been awarded £189,166 through Arts Council England’s Small Capital Grants to make Toynbee Studios even more accessible and carbon neutral by 2025.
Over the coming years, we will transform Toynbee Studios into a more sustainable, digitally resilient and inclusive space for diverse artists and audiences, installing more accessible furniture and equipment, enhancing our digital resilience, and becoming renewably-powered and heated, single-use plastic-free and zero waste by 2025. With accessible working space in ever increasing demand, this grant help us to provide better working conditions for disabled artists, arts professionals and audiences using Toynbee Studios.
Here are a few of the things we’ll be doing over the next few years:
- Phasing out gas so we are heated by renewably power and increasing on-site electricity generation through more solar panels
- More LED lighting
- More storage so we can recycle materials and encourage a circular economy
- Better waste management and recycling
- Encouraging behavioural change and more environmentally-friendly behaviour
- Improving our Quiet Space
- Installing new fixtures, fittings and furniture to enable better access around the building
- Creating a more accessible online application portal for artists
- Improved WIFI
- New software to reduce our printing costs and paper usage
“With sustainability as one of our core values, we are really excited to receive this support from Arts Council England to make Toynbee Studios carbon-neutral. As a co-delivery partner of Unlimited, the world’s largest disability arts commissioning programme, we can now create an even more accessible building for artists, arts professionals and audiences. Improving our digital infrastructure will help us, and the many creative organisations using Toynbee Studios, to better support the artists we work with.”
Deborah Chadbourn, Executive Director and Róise Goan, Artistic Director
The funding will benefit the 36,000 people using Toynbee Studios each year, including artists, audiences, staff and our 20 tenant organisations, increasing the digital reach and accessibility of ours and others’ work, widening our audiences and reducing our carbon emissions.