Charity

Help Musicians

Help Musicians is a charity that loves music and for over 100 years has been working to make a meaningful difference to the lives of musicians across the UK. We offer a broad range of help to support music creators in times of crisis and opportunity – ensuring musicians can achieve their creative potential and sustain a career in music.

Charity
Voluntary Work
Music

Open Project

What do your people love about coming to work?

The feeling that we’re making a difference to people’s lives; whether through providing financial support to create music, linking a musician up with a mentor or being there to help when times get tough, we’re here to support musicians to thrive.

Our dedicated and talented team work hard to make a meaningful difference to the lives of thousands of music creators across the UK.

Our work has a direct impact on the lives of thousands of people every year. If you are passionate about creating a world where musicians can thrive, then this could be the place for you.

2021

Established an ED&I taskforce made up of staff from across the charity

To fully realise our mission and support all professional eligible musicians no matter their age, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, socio-economic background we embed equity, diversity and inclusion practice into our daily work and into our annual strategic planning. Our dedicated internal Equity, Diversity and Inclusion taskforce drawn from across the organisation establishes an annual work programme that focuses on ensuring that the charity is actively inclusive. Our activities take places across internal departments such as HR through to our public facing programmes and services. We allocate budget for work of the taskforce, we are working with a small number of Black-led organisations who are enabling positive change within the music industry.

2022

Expanded our eligibility criteria so that all musicians with the right to live and work in the UK can access the full breadth of our support as soon as they needed it.

Our support has always been conditional on having the legal right to live and work in the UK – professional musicians with UK residency, or with visas giving them the right to live and work here, can apply to Help Musicians for support. Before this change we imposed an additional condition on those with visas, by also requiring them to have lived in the country for at least 183 days in the past year (in line with UK tax residency rules) before they could turn to us for assistance. We believe that our lives have long been enhanced by the global influences that have helped shape the culture of these isles so, as a charity powered by the love of music, it’s only right that we make our services accessible to everyone who legally lives here and contributes to our cultural life.

We strive to create a workplace that reflects the diverse communities around us and where everyone feels seen, heard, valued, and empowered to succeed. Clearly, there is more work to be done, but together we can build a more equal workplace and world for all.