Arts Council England joins Future Cities Forum Summer Awards 2025

Future Cities Forum is delighted that Hazel Edwards, Area Director, South East (Senior Director) Arts Council England, is returning to take part in our all-female line up of judges for Summer Awards 2025.

Hazel leads the delivery of the Let’s Create 10-year strategy across the South East area and strategic investment to make real impact for the arts, from Brighton to Cambridge, working with grass-roots organisations to cultural icons. She is committed to making culture and arts education accessible for all with a career spanning the university and the cultural sectors in three regions – the North East, the South West and most recently, the South East. Before joining Arts Council England in 2021, Hazel led research in arts, humanities and education at Durham University and the University of the West of England Bristol, where she was Associate Dean for Research & Innovation.

She originally trained as a history curator at Leicester University and worked in museums and art galleries in the North East for 25 years; she was the first woman to lead Discovery Museum, the large science and industry museum in Newcastle upon Tyne. She has extensive experience of board membership including Director and Deputy Chair of Bristol Ideas. She sat on the Museums Association Board for three years and in 2015 she became a Fellow of the Museums Association in recognition of her contribution to the sector. Her wide experience of universities, local authorities and the arts drives her commitment to developing dynamic regional cultural ecologies.

Meanwhile Arts Council England has been describing how public investment can attract private money:

'We’ve published a new report last month – called ‘Leading the Crowd’ – showing the important role that public investment in England’s arts and cultural sector plays in attracting further income from private investors and earned sources. 

'The report demonstrates the importance of the ‘Crowding In’ effect. It is this mixed economy model that sustains most cultural organisations in England, combining public funding, private investment and earned income. 

'The report shows that public investment makes organisations more viable and attractive to private investors – like having a ‘kite mark’. It also leverages additional income by encouraging innovation, supporting early-stage research and development, and providing the stability organisations need for long-term planning and resilience.'

Based on interviews with eight leading cultural institutions, including National Theatre, Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art and Royal Shakespeare Company, the report identifies six ways that public investment enables Crowding In and how it benefits cultural organisations in: 

• Delivering capital projects

• Generating private investment

• Driving additional commercial income

• Encouraging innovation

• Developing new activity

• Building organisational resilience

  
  

Sir Nicholas Serota, Chair, Arts Council England, said: “Organisations of all sizes and across art forms have consistently told us that public investment from Arts Council England serves as a mark of quality—giving private investors and philanthropists the confidence to back their work. This report highlights eight such case studies, demonstrating how sustained public funding is vital to the mixed funding ecology that underpins the strength of the cultural sector in this country.”