As we approach the 2026 Festival, which opens next Saturday, we are thrilled to share the news that Leeds Song has been awarded a National Lottery Project Grant by Arts Council England — a milestone that helps us cement our Festival work, alongside the range of community, education, and outreach activity that helps us fill the city with song.

We also want to extend a heartfelt thank you to our generous Friends and the wider Leeds Song community who continue to support our work. This means the world to us, and your generosity shone especially bright during our recent Big Give campaign. Together, you helped us surpass our £11,000 fundraising target — raising an amazing £12,845! We could not do this without you. Your belief in our mission continues to inspire everything we do.

Buoyed by this remarkable support, we have been able to deepen our community education and outreach work—activity that remains essential to our artistic purpose and strengthens the foundations of our organisation as we run up to the Festival.

Over the past two weeks, we invited some former Leeds Song Young Artists (Anusha Merrin, Jong Sun Woo and Lizzie Bett Estrada) to present pop‑up recitals in unexpected places around Yorkshire, surprising, delighting, and engaging audiences who might not otherwise encounter live song. Their return demonstrated not only the strength of our talent development work provided through our Young Artist training programme, but also the enduring connection we maintain with our artistic alumni. We partnered with a number of local organisations as we took song into the community: West Yorkshire Music Hub, ArtForms, Leeds Conservatoire, Leeds City Museum, Chapel FM, and Kirklees and Barnsley Councils. Also taking place over the past month, we welcomed hundreds of children to this term’s culmination concert at Pudsey Civic Hall, following several weeks of workshops delivered completely free of charge in schools across the city.

Across this period of activity, we have placed song at the heart of communities—meeting people where they are, sparking creativity, and showcasing the transformative power of collective music‑making. These partnerships and performances underline exactly why this funding matters: it enables us to keep building connections, expanding access, and celebrating the excellence of our organisation as we move confidently toward the Festival and beyond.