Royal Ballet Benevolent Fund

The Royal Ballet Benevolent Fund, also known as Dance Professionals Fund, is a specialist charity dedicated to relieving hardship among dance professionals through targeted welfare support. Founded on empathy, confidentiality, and respect for the precarious realities of dance careers, it upholds a philosophy of dignity-preserving safety nets, rapid crisis response, and sector-specific expertise. Its theory of change emphasizes preventing poverty, enabling rehabilitation and career transitions to safeguard wellbeing, future prospects, and professional identity in a high-risk field where public support often falls short.

It prioritizes poverty relief and financial hardship support for professional ballet dancers, contemporary dancers, choreographers, dance teachers, and associated professionals in established dance companies and recognised examining bodies, including present members, former performers, injured individuals, retired artists facing end-of-career transitions, and their dependants. Funded interventions include cost-of-living grants, one-off payments for essential household goods and urgent needs, financial assistance for rehabilitation and medical costs enabling return-to-work, practical career transition support such as travel costs for job interviews and retraining programs, advisory services, and signposting to additional resources. These address core challenges like illness, injury recovery, income uncertainty, and employment barriers, fostering recovery, resilience, and sustained livelihoods through person-centred, confidential aid tailored to dance sector vulnerabilities.

Exclusions encompass grants to organisations, project or core funding, unrelated professions, or non-dance sectors, focusing solely on individual hardship for qualifying dance professionals and dependants. Distinctive for its exclusive dance commitment, trustee expertise from the industry, and rapid, trauma-informed responses preventing crisis escalation, it uniquely serves UK-wide dance communities with deep understanding of artistic precarity, differentiating from generalist hardship funds by prioritising rehabilitation, transition support, and dignity for this specialised, high-skill workforce.