Fund details
Opens: Monday 15 September 2025
Closes: Thursday 16 October 2025
Decision date: 3 December 2025, TBC
About this fund
This fund prioritises practitioners in early development stages, underpaid founders or managers, underfunded events, and innovative ideas that help create sustainable living wage pathways.
The Arts and Culture Living Wage Fund runs alongside the Arts and Culture Project Fund and follows the same application deadlines and decision timeframes.
Priorities and outcomes
This fund has 4 priorities:
- Artist during the development stage of creating their work.
- Founder / manager who is underpaid for the hours they work.
- Event which does not attract sufficient funding or income to pay a living wage to artists and crew.
- An organisation with an innovative idea that can assist artists to achieve the living wage on a sustainable basis.
As a branch of Council’s Arts and Culture funding, funded activity must also align with at least one strand of Aho Tini – Arts, Culture and Creativity Strategy.
Eligibility
Applicants must:
- be applying for an Arts and Culture Project Grant
- meet one of four fund priorities
- demonstrate a genuine need for Living Wage funding (i.e. a budget showing an inability to pay living wage, and an explanation of what else has been considered)
- clearly show how this funding will contribute to the project to enable artists/practitioners to be paid a living wage
- commit to increasing a specified number of people to the Living Wage for their contribution to the funded activity.
Officers will consider organisational proposals to provide support to artists/artworkers beyond normal project operations.
What we don't fund
- Recipients of Multi-year funding contracts or Annual stability grants for their normal operations.
- Projects funded through Multi-year curation funding.
- Organisations in the Multiyear and Annual stability funds already receiving funding linked to living wage reporting in their contracts.
Funding amounts and timeframes
This fund has $150,000 available annually for two years, 2025/26 and 2026/27 financial years. Decisions are made by the Pītau Pūmanawa | Grants sub-committee and communicated within 4–6 weeks after closing date.
Apply for the fund
Check you have all the required documents before starting your application.
If you have applied for funding from the Council before, you can create a new funding request by logging into the funding portal. If you receive an error message when trying to access the funding portal on a mobile device please use these instructions or contact the Funding Team.
Go to Funding Portal
If you need guidance or you're not sure if this is the right fund to apply for please contact us.