Clore Prize Fund

The winners of the top prize of £100,000 are:

Jamie Beddard and Claire Hodgson, founders of Extraordinary Bodies, the UK’s only permanent integrated circus company, made up equally of disabled and non-disabled performers. In 2015, the company will change people’s lives in five UK cities, establishing an integrated youth performance company for people from disadvantaged backgrounds and with mixed physical abilities, embedding the company’s work in the community for years to come.

The seven winners of prizes of £50,000 are:

Ruth Campbell
Twenty More: helping a community to help itself
Ruth Campbell, focusing on a single Edinburgh high rise community, intends to develop a model of intense community development that will empower its residents to take charge of their finances and their lives, with the simple idea of helping people break out of poverty by encouraging households to raise their incomes by £20 a week.

Tom Doust and Tom Andrews
Imagination Lab: a creative space for social change
Tom Doust a Clore Social Fellow, and Tom Andrews, a Clore Cultural Fellow, have worked together to devise the Imagination Lab, a creative space for children and young people to design ideas that will make a difference to society. The Lab will build on the experience of Canterbury-based People United, an arts organisation exploring kindness and social change, and support the planned Children's Museum London. Designed, led and grown with children and young people, the Lab will be housed in an experimental mobile space and will visit schools, festivals, and neighbourhoods in Kent and across London.

Stef Lewandowski
The Awesome Box: a tool for techno-teaching
Stef wants to put the magic of technological discovery into primary schools, helping the schools to fulfil their challenging requirements around the new ICT curriculum. He is proposing the Awesome Box, full of exciting gadgets, circuit boards and programmable machines to show children that they can produce as well as consume technology.

Ben Payne (with Joe Hallgarten and Alice King-Farlow)
Ministry of Stories: spreading the word
Ben Payne has been co-director of the Ministry of Stories (MoS) since 2010. Joe Hallgarten and Alice King-Farlow, Clore Fellows, are Trustees and helped set up the organisation. MoS is hidden behind the mysterious shop-front of Hoxton Street Monster Supplies, running free writing programmes for 3,000 local young people a year, working with 400 trained volunteer writing mentors. Now the plan is to open up new Ministries, with their own fantastic shop fronts, starting in Rotherham.

David Russell and Rachel Grunwald
Trellick Tales: making high-rise history
David Russell, a Clore Social Fellow, and Rachel Grunwald, a Clore Cultural Fellow, have been working with S.P.I.D., a ‘Specially Produced Innovatively Directed’ youth arts company in Kensal House estate, helping disadvantaged young people bring their neglected local environment to life through theatre, film and historical research. They are now about to tackle Trellick Tower, the brutalist 1960s north west London council estate in one of the most deprived wards in the country. Teenagers will take part in a year-long project that will give them a voice and demonstrate to their community that there is another way to see the architectural environment they live in.

Emma Stenning
Bike Shed theatre: the next generation
Based in Exeter, the Bike Shed Theatre champions new work and innovation in its 60 seat auditorium, and was voted the UK’s most welcoming theatre in 2013. Bike Shed offers emerging young theatre companies to present their work and develop new material that can be tested as work in progress before an informed audience. Over the next two years, 20 companies will profit from Bike Shed Theatre’s mentoring and producing skills, and from their developing network.

Michael Trainor (with Polly Hamilton)
Art B&B: bringing Blackpool to creative life
Blackpool has 4,000 B&Bs, many in a poor state of repair. Michael Trainor, artistic director of creative consortium LeftCoast, has teamed up with Polly Hamilton, head of Blackpool Cultural Services, to take over one of the town’s vacant B&Bs and turn it into an arts space, while remaining a fully functioning hotel. The renovation work will be carried out by local residents in an addiction recovery programme, working in partnership with Lancashire Constabulary.