Sheffield City Trust (SIV), Showroom Cinema and Museums Sheffield are some of the city’s high profile organisations – and they’re also charities.

Who knew?  We did! Jill Theobald chatted to them to find out more about fundraising, finance, and future growth.

Sheffield City Trust (SIV)

Andrew Snelling, chief executive of SIV and Sheffield City Trust

Sheffield City Trust was the first leisure trust formed in the UK. Since 1987 we’ve led the way with an unrivalled mix of sport, leisure and entertainment venues to become The Health and Wellbeing Charity.

Everything we do is focused on delivering our main objective; improving the health and wellbeing of the people of Sheffield. Our not-for-profit status means all our surplus is reinvested in improving our activities and venues to ensure we are here for the communities we serve.

All organisations (for-profits and not-for-profits) have to be sustainable, so the objectives for all organisations is to make surpluses (or profits).  The main difference is what’s is done with these profits.

At a not-for-profit, all surpluses are reinvested back into the organisation – either through improvements to existing services or doing additional activities.

At Sheffield City Trust, we allocate monies to fund specific projects that may require funding, but that meet our overall organisation mission and values.  Some examples of this would be working in the community rather than in our own venues, such as the project with Sheffcare Care Homes, or supporting community initiatives, such as the Toothbrushing Club we supported in Firth Park.

Charities or not-for-profit have a range of funding options.  The most commonly thought of is donations – however, most charities ensure they have an income stream, for example shops selling donations to the general public. 

Sheffield City Trust runs a range of income generating activities from teaching children to swim, to fitness and golf memberships as well as hosting gigs and shows at the FlyDSA Arena and Sheffield City Hall.

While we are an independent charitable organisation, the majority of the venues we operate are owned by Sheffield City Council – we also receive funding from the council – so we therefore naturally work closely with them to ensure the continued provision of these services for the people of Sheffield.

Showroom Cinema

Meabh O’Donovan, development manager

We receive some grant funding from BFI but we’re not Arts Council funded, and we don’t receive much funding from elsewhere.  Ours is an interesting business model with a commercial arm that supports the aims of the charity, but we also need to fundraise.

Our building – which we took on 25 years ago – is not listed but it is quite an iconic 1930s building which we refurbished so there was fundraising around that and today for the maintenance.

We’ve refurbished screens one and two and want to do three and while we have used grant funding for the new terrace being outside, maintaining our cinemas relies on fundraising.

Sheffield punches above its weight when it comes to film and our fundraising dinner in April (read more details on our calendar pages) is a celebration of Sheffield film, and acts as a launchpad event for that year’s fundraising.

Our cinema programme allows us to screen culturally diverse films from all over the world that no one else in Sheffield screens.

As an independent, four-screen cinema, we are the only one in Sheffield to have an in-house programming team and there are only a handful of similar venues around the country. Not being centrally programmed means we can respond to what people want to watch – for example, the Everyone’s Talking About Jamie theatre production was screened a long time after others had stopped because people still wanted to see it! Other cinemas can’t do that.

We’re an educational charity – that’s the crux of it but it can also be one of the biggest challenges. We run quite a robust education programme and can deliver school cinema sessions as a ‘treat’ or they can be linked to the curriculum. Schools can put on their own films using our facilities and we run residential programmes for some age groups.

Our Student Study Days are a new partnership with the BFI that uses film to support learning for 16-19-year olds. The BFI run regular events across all key stages in London, but this is the first time they’ve rolled them out across the country to provide greater access to schools and colleges in the regions.

It’s an exciting opportunity for us to expand on the work we do with schools, and show just how beneficial film is across the curriculum and how it can be used to motivate students to engage with their studies in new ways.

Fur us as a charity, it’s not just about promoting the arts but promoting the arts through the community and one of our key aims is helping people develop a lifelong love of cinema. This means Kino Bambino (when children aged under one come into the cinema with parents), Cine 26 (which is free and allows everyone aged 26 or under to see any film from the regular programme, any day at any time for £4.50), and our dementia friendly café and film screenings.

Museums Sheffield

Partnership development officer Grace Brierley

We’ve been a charity since 2008 and it costs more than £3m to run Millennium Galleries, Weston Park and Graves Gallery every year. Our external funders are Sheffield City Council and Arts Council, but we still have to find £1m ourselves.

We welcome more than 1 million visitors a year across all three sites and showcase international and national arts exhibitions, but all our exhibitions are free.

Graves started the collection saying there needed to be a library and a gallery within the city centre, he created that and gave a lot to the collection, but it was based on business people supporting and continuing that – Museums Sheffield wouldn’t exist without those early businesses – meanwhile Ruskin wanted to give to the people of the city somewhere to go to enjoy outside of their working life.

Graves and Millennium Galleries are in the city centre close to Sheffield Hallam University and lots of businesses, and Weston Park is close to University of Sheffield and the hospitals so is often used for respite or the first place people visit out of hospital.

We support communities by offering safe spaces for everyone to come and use. More than 15,000 school children have used our workshops, we host Conversation Clubs – come along and learn and talk about art, do something different to do on your lunch break – and we started our Dementia Cafes last Spring with the help of Counter Context. 

People need to feel our collection is their collection, have that sense of ownership – that it’s a people’s gallery and a destination for Sheffield. We bring people to Sheffield who want to live here, work here, spend a weekend here and contribute to the city’s visitor economy.

People must feel the museums are there for them – I went as a child while I was a patient at Sheffield Children’s Hospital, my parents and grandparents took me, and I want to take my children.

In order to do all of this we need people’s support to continue our work and it’s challenging as an arts organisation as it’s not necessarily what people tend to think of as a ‘quintessential charity’.

We’ve built a relationship with Sheffield Property Association to communicate the message that its not just the beautiful architecture of the buildings, but what’s inside them and are also working with an eclectic mix of businesses including Vine Hotels and Together Money.

Businesses can support us by choosing us as Charity of the Year – like our friends at Benchmark have just done! – or by becoming a corporate sponsor, giving gift-in-kind donations or sponsoring an exhibition like Arup and CMS did most recently with Leonardo Da Vinci: A Life in Drawing.

Our corporate partners can use our ever-changing exhibitions to entertain clients or have special event views or tours for staff – it’s helping grow employees’ skills and knowledge of so it’s as much a partnership as it is sponsorship.

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