Funding Opportunities
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Make It Happen Fund
What is available: 20 awards of £1,500 each
Who can apply: Alumni within 3 years of graduation
Read about the 2025/26 awardees here
The Make It Happen Fund gives our most recent graduates access to a competitive pot of seed funding to support their career goals and ambitions.
The fund supports a wide range of early-stage development activity in areas such as: training, networking, testing ideas, starting up companies, staging pop-up events or digital performances, and forming new collaborations.
The fund is currently closed and will reopen for applications in early summer.
Stay up to date with the Make It Happen Fund by subscribing to the CEDO newsletter
Ideas Fund
What is available: Two £500 prizes per month during term time
Who can apply: All current students (undergraduate & postgraduate)
The Ideas Fund provides students at RCS with resource and support to explore new ideas, extend their practice, produce their own work, and take their first steps into creative enterprise.
The idea can be big or small. It could be an artistic idea, something you want to produce, an idea driven by social or community impact. The idea could also be related to the development of your career or could help you earn a living as an artist.
Wraparound support and mentoring by the Creative Enterprise Development Office will support awardees to further develop their idea and plan for their next steps.
CEDOxConverge Ideas Fund
What is available: Up to 5 awards of £1,000 each
Who can apply: All current students (undergraduate & postgraduate)
The CEDOxConverge Ideas Fund is a one-off funding opportunity for RCS students to explore an early creative idea with the potential to grow into a future creative company or charity.
Designed for experimentation, the fund supports first steps such as testing ideas, prototyping creative work, running pop-up events, or sharing work-in-progress. You don’t need business experience, a registered company, or a fully formed proposal — just curiosity, willingness to learn, and an idea you want to explore.
Up to five awards of £1,000 are available, alongside wraparound mentoring and support from the Creative Enterprise Development Office (CEDO) and the Converge team, including guidance on next steps and future funding.
Open to current RCS undergraduate and postgraduate students leading a project or a company/charity that is pre-registration or in its first six months of trading.
Application Deadline: Thursday 12 February 2026 at 17:00.
