CiB Charity of the Year

We’re very pleased to announce we are going to have our first CiB Charity of the Year.

*round of applause*

As you know, Created in Birmingham is a blog linking up creative and artistic communities: we find out what’s going on in the area and promote it voluntarily. Whilst that’s in itself is a good thing, we feel that we’re in the position to be able to go one step further in helping those communities. We’re joining forces with The CAW Foundation (CAW stands for Creatives at Work) to fundraise for Artistic, Cultural, Sporting and Social Change projects in Birmingham, and the funds will be administered by the Birmingham & Black Country Community Foundation.

More specifically, we’ll be raising money to support projects that work with young people and disadvantaged groups, empowering them to change their outlook and opportunities in life. Together CAW and CiB will have complete control over how the money we raise will be spent – we will help The CAW Foundation team decide which worthy good causes and charities that are already doing amazing work in our local communities will benefit from CAW Grants. We have an effective way of having a say of where the money goes, directing funds raised into the heart of our local communities, encouraging activities that benefit us all.

The CAW Foundation is all about ‘Creatives at work for the next generation’ so – it really is the perfect partnership for our creative community of CiB to make a change and have a real impact on helping to inspire and shape the future professionals of our sector.

Rob Langley-Swain founded The CAW Foundation in August 2012 and had this to say about our new partnership:

I’m thrilled that CiB have chosen CAW as their Charity of the Year for the next 12 months. I set up The CAW Foundation because I felt there was a real gap and a need for people to support small, grass roots good causes and charities that have suffered from funding and grant cuts from the likes of The Arts Council and Local Authorities. I witnessed a number of amazing charities shut down or diminish their creative output because of lost funding and decided I couldn’t just stand by and let it happen.

The CAW Foundation’s ambition is to raise at least £50,000 by 2015 – 60% of everything we raise will go in to a long term legacy trust fund, which will then earn interest and pay out to good causes long in to the future. 40% of funds raised each year will be spent immediately in small grants to good causes that meet our funding criteria and can demonstrate what impact they’ll have on Young People and deprived communities – through Artistic, Cultural, Sporting or Social Change projects.

In the past 11 months we have managed to raise a very respectable £13,000 and we are set to make our first round of Grants to good causes in September. Having the support of CiB’s community is going to be a real boost and enable us to reach even more young people through numerous projects with our grant making – and ultimately that is what it is all about. We can’t wait to get cracking on some creative fundraising!

This is just an introduction to CiB’s Charity of the Year intentions: you’ll notice we’ve added a widget on the right handside of the page that links to our justgiving page – which is a little inactive at the moment whilst we’re event planning –  throughout the year we will be holding fundraising events and other fun things. The basic idea being we’ll start doing CiB stuff in real life (not just online), and raise money for good causes at the same time.

We’ve just hit 10,000 followers on twitter, so we decided on the figure of £10,000 to begin with.

If you have any questions, have ideas, or would like to get involved, then speak to me about it by emailing createdinbirmingham@gmail.com with FAO Kerry in the subject line.