This Baring Foundation report briefly discusses the evidence base behind the physical and mental wellbeing impacts of the arts on older people as one of the foundation’s motivating factors for its funding programme, and then focuses on the specific contexts and and types of arts projects that the foundation has sought to support throughout the UK from 2010-2014. This has included programmes with a focus on singing and dancing, the arts in care homes, festivals for arts and older people, and support of local arts authorities in engagement with the elderly community.

Along with local authorities, the four national Arts Councils in the UK are the most important institutional funders of the arts, and the Baring Foundation is the only independent funder to have funding partnerships with all four Councils. This has greatly magnified the impact of the foundation’s resources, and has facilitated much of the success of the funding programme.

The report ends by detailing the foundation’s efforts to gather inspiration and examples of best-practice from the international research pool on arts and older people, and by emphasizing the Baring Foundation’s belief that there is still much more to be done in establishing a dedicated funding platform for arts organisations to work with older people, along with changing broad attitudes about the role and importance of older people in cultural and artistic engagement. A list of the grants provided by the foundation is included, along with a brief description of the organisations and projects being funded.

The Baring Foundation is a non-profit, grant-giving organisation with broad goals of improving the quality of life of people facing disadvantage & discrimination, and specifically within the arts realm to increase the quality and quantity of the arts for older people, especially vulnerable older people. The Foundation is clear that the arts have intrinsic value. They are fundamentally important for their unique ability to give joy and to express our human need to understand ourselves and the world. So everyone has a right to participate in the arts, but research shows that this participation declines after 65, and it is this issue that the Foundation’s funding programme for the arts and older people is trying to remedy.