Help Musicians

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.

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.