Incubate

A headshot of Dave Young, a white man with short brown hair and a brown beard. Dave looks off to the left. He is outside and there are flowers, grass and trees in the background

Incubate

Incubate: building disabled-led arts organisations.

The disabled community is brimming with ideas for new arts organisations, but a lack of support to grow those. At CRIPtic, we are committed to growing and developing the deaf and disabled-led artistic ecosystem. Incubate explores everything CRIPtic had to learn as we began – learning from our successes and failures, our mistakes and experiments, and sharing that information to support new organisations through their early development.

Who we’re looking for

Incubate is a development programme for four UK-based disabled* people or small disabled-led organisations, working through their first year of structured development with discussions on everything from financial management to social media.  

We’re looking for creatives who are looking to diversify their artistic career and who have an idea or the beginnings of an arts organisation that offers something new to the disability arts ecosphere.

*When we talk about disabled people, we mean “people who face disableist [including audist] barriers”, or “people who identify themselves as deaf or disabled – or are identified by others as deaf or disabled in society”. To find out more about what we mean by this, please look at our website.

What the programme involves

Incubate is a 12-month programme of monthly peer-facilitated sessions. While CRIPtic manages these sessions, there are no ‘experts’ – we’re all learning from each other.

There is one space on the programme per organisation; the same person is expected to attend all the sessions and can report back to their organisation as needed. 

Peer-faciliated sessions will all take place online, with captions, rest breaks, and BSL interpretation where required, and we aim to meet other access requirements across the programme as far as possible.

Payment

As a mentoring and development scheme, this programme is not paid. It is free to attend and CRIPtic will cover the access costs associated with joining the programme.  

More information

If you want to hear more about this opportunity, we are hosting a drop-in to discuss the project with Artistic Director Jamie Hale on DATE 2025. Book your space for the drop-in here.

Please also read our FAQs below, which contain more information about the programme and what we’re looking for.

Apply to become a Incubate member

To apply, please fill in the below forms by 5pm on DATE 2025:

  • Application form (with BSL)
  • Diversity & monitoring form

You can also submit an audio or video file in spoken English or BSL (7 minutes max), or download and send the questions as a Word document to team@cripticarts.org. Please find the Word versions of these forms below:

  • Word version of application form:
  • Word version of diversity & monitoring form


If you need access support to input answers into the form, we can help out – just email team@cripticarts.org. We’re able to support applicants with transcribing answers on a 1:1 Zoom, but cannot provide or fund individualised access support for applications beyond this. If you have any queries about this, please contact us on team@cripticarts.org to discuss.