HOME Needs Your Help

Hello HOME Family,

As you might know, HOME was created with the aim of responding directly to the communal need for a more accessible and welcoming arts space with both a well curated presentation of exhibitions, and a wide programme of events. HOME is a malleable concept which transforms and responds to the artists it houses and the community it is built for. Founded in November 2020, by multi-disciplinary artist Ronan Mckenzie, our space is one of very few black owned art spaces in London that is also self-funded. From her personal experiences within the arts, she felt it necessary to build a distinct space with a new set of understandings of how to contextualise a diverse range of artists and provide a new infrastructure for creativity.

With a leading focus on supporting Black and Indigenous People of Colour, HOME offers considered curatorial and event offerings pertaining to the work of BIPOC artists for free. Alongside exhibitions and events, HOME also has a free creative work space which we encourage our community to use. Since our inception we have worked with over 100 BIPOC creative practitioners through our exhibition programme, events programming, artist response series, grant offerings, residency opportunities, and beyond, irrespective of their experience.

With that being said, we are currently in (desperate) need of support to keep HOME alive. Over the past two years, Ronan has continually injected money made through her photography practice to keep HOME afloat; although we have had the kind support through brand partnerships through a few projects, this unfortunately hasn’t been enough to cover all the costs necessary to run the space, and with challenging times hitting the creative industries, the financial pressure of maintaining HOME has been and continues to weigh heavy on Ronan’s shoulders and is no longer something that she is able to financially support alone.

For transparency:

Monthly Rent and Building Service Charge: £5,261 per month (Charged quarterly)

Council Business Rates: Previously £16,000 per year, this year we received a discount of £6000.

Monthly Salaries (Ronan doesn’t take a salary): £8657 per month

Utilities, Heating, Wifi, Website, Business Subscriptions (Adobe, Mailchimp, GoDaddy, Shopify, etc.) Approximately £2000, however rapidly rising

Exhibition and Programming Costs: Previously we have spent £12,000-£15,000 solely on exhibition installation, framing, associated texts, programming, etc, however as we can no longer afford to do this, we have to reduce our offering and expenditure to minimum costs which we expect to be approximately £6000.

The £50,000 we are asking for will sustain us until the end of January whilst we launch our new ideas to make HOME financially sustainable. This will help us cover our overheads such as rent, staff salaries, electricity and gas for the next two months. As a team we have thought long and hard about how we can make it to the end of January but currently as it stands it is not feasible. This isn’t something we wanted to ask our community for but we have reached a critical point where we have no choice but to ask, and as difficult as it is to ask, the support of our community or those who see value in what we aim to provide is imperative in keeping HOME alive.

Our 2023 objectives

We are sharing our objectives for the upcoming year, for our audience to understand how we envisage we will tackle our aim of becoming financially sustainable. We believe that retaining the ownership of HOME is fundamental to growth of community and allows for us to maintain HOME’s ethos and our autonomy. We want HOME to outlive us. Whilst the £50,000 will not cover this, it will cover the time we need to develop and realise these objectives:

Launch HOME Grown - Creative Agency. Through HOME Grown we will be able to expand our offering to collaborate with brands and individuals through Creative Consultancy, Art Direction, Curation, Spatial Design, Cultural and Social Programming, Event Production and Management and Content Creation.

HOME Grown will enable us to further expand our capacity to achieve our aims, while financially supporting us so we can maintain HOME’s ethos of being an accessible art space for the Black communities & People of Colour.

Deliver seven exhibitions - in line with our theme observation, we will present six solo shows and one group exhibition, inviting artists to share their creative practice and perspective with our community. We aim to create rich experiences which uplift our community and propel them forward within their practices. Alongside these exhibitions, we will have a low-cost programme of events consisting of workshops, book clubs, talks and more.

Launch HOME Times - Our Bi-annual Newspaper; a cultural guide.

Launch our podcast - Haja Fanta and Ronan Mckenzie in conversation with artists

Thank you for taking the time to read this, we really appreciate it.

Love Courtney, Elif, Haja, Joana, Ronan and Shadeh <3