Incubate
Incubate: building disabled-led arts organisations.
Disabled people in the arts are carving new ground and leading change, as individuals, or running small organisations. Successfully leading projects, organisations, campaigns, and movements requires an understanding of everything from brand and pitch to finance and project management. Incubate takes Jamie’s journey and the development of CRIPtic, and supports four emerging disabled arts leaders or organisations through everything they had to learn – from successes to failures and mistakes to experiments.
Who we’re looking for
Incubate is a leadership programme for four UK-based disabled* emerging cultural leaders.
We’re looking for disabled people leading change or building organisations in the arts – people developing and communicating ideas and making an impact. The impact could be sector-wide or community-specific, as long as you’re adding to a shared ecosphere of disabled people and organisations.
*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. These are structured and led by CRIPtic, but participants will be expected to prepare and present from their own experience and expertise at most sessions. Incubate invests in individual leaders – so even if you’re leading an organisation, the same person is expected to come each time.
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.