Diverse City

Diverse City is a UK-registered performing arts charity founded in 2005 to advance equality and social justice in culture by amplifying marginalised and underrepresented voices across the arts, from onstage to boardrooms. Its core mission challenges inequalities in performing arts, emphasising disability, intersectionality, and barrier removal for excluded groups, with values rooted in social justice, access, inclusivity, collaboration, shared leadership, and art's transformative power drawn from lived experience. Distinctively, it models best practices in governance, safeguarding, and equity while blending high-profile productions with sector advocacy as both practitioner and thought leader.

It prioritises disability arts, representation, community engagement, and poverty relief through commissioning, producing, and touring innovative shows like Extraordinary Bodies circus partnerships, Waldo’s Circus of Magic and Terror, and productions such as Human and Delicate. Supported activities include co-created performances, artist training, young disabled leaders' programmes, accessible festivals with audio description and BSL, and community initiatives like Young People’s and Connecting Communities, benefiting disabled people across ages, genders, and ethnicities, plus broader public access to inclusive culture.

Diverse City does not accept unsolicited applications or run open grant programmes, instead pursuing proactive collaborations, co-productions, and commissioned projects with pre-selected partners—primarily small to medium-sized UK arts, youth, disability-led, and grassroots groups. No geographic restrictions apply (UK-wide reach, England focus), income thresholds, or entity specifications, though it prefers equity-committed organisations. Grant sizes, deadlines, and meetings are unspecified and case-by-case via direct approaches or advertised creative calls; no core costs, capital, or unrestricted funding.

Unique for embedding inclusion in all operations rather than superficial diversity efforts, it avoids one-off interventions, focusing on systemic change through methodologies like accessible rehearsals and advocacy for policy shifts.