Crossway Foundation
The Crossway Foundation will be a UK-based arts and education centre dedicated to cultural exchange between the UK, the Middle East and the wider Islamic world. It is a collaborative project being developed and implemented by Offscreen, Edge of Arabia,The Prince's Regeneration Trust and a group of social entrepreneurs, artists and educators, who over the past decade have established a variety of acclaimed and educational cultural initiatives.
There has never been a more important time for this kind of project in East London. Offscreen’s work in our school has had a very positive and practical impact on how students view the outside world and themselves.
Mrs Bushra Nasir
Head Teacher, Plashet School
East Ham, London Borough of Newham
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The Crossway Foundation is a collaborative project being developed and implemented by Offscreen, Edge of Arabia and The Prince’s Regeneration Trust.
Founding Champions
With the momentum gathered in late 2010 and early 2011, the Crossway Foundation has secured support from an amazing network of Founding Champions who understand the significance of this historic project.
The Al Waleed Bin Talal Foundation
The Farook Foundation
The JA Clark Charitable Trust
Fady Jameel
Abdulnasser Gharem
Mohammed Hafiz
William Lawrie
Ahmed Mater
Her Highness Lulu al-Sabah
Hamza Serafi
Saadi Soudavar
Rami Alturki
The Vision
The Crossway Foundation will be a UK-based arts and education centre dedicated to cultural exchange between the UK, the Middle East and the wider Islamic world.
It is a collaborative project being developed and implemented by a group of social entrepreneurs, artists and educators, who over the past decade have established a variety of acclaimed and educational cultural initiatives. These are now coming together to form the Crossway Foundation.
The Foundation will draw on the energies and expertise of all contributors to expand and consolidate the educational and artistic programmes already being offered. It is the mechanism by which the founding organisations can transform the scale and impact of their work. The Foundation therefore will represent both the physical building, which will house educational and artistic activities, and the umbrella arrangement through which the constituent organisations can grow.
What the Foundation will do:
- Showcase Middle Eastern art through a permanent gallery space
- Improve education through Offscreen’s school outreach programme in our network of 1,500 schools around the UK, Middle East and wider Islamic world
- Provide an HQ for Offscreen’s youth expeditions programme
- Run an artists-in-residence and international visiting-artists programmes
- Flexible office spaces for UK-Middle East focused social enterprises
- Regeneration and socio-economic development in a deprived area of the Olympic Borough of Tower Hamlets
The Building
The Prince’s Regeneration Trust has been advising Crossway since 2006, and has helped to seek a future home with significant community regeneration potential.
A terrace of three buildings in the newly designated conservation area of Redchurch Street in Shoreditch has now been identified as ideal for Crossway’s purposes. The Trust will support Crossway to conserve and restore the building, and advise them in making the building both fit for purpose and sustainable. The buildings are located in an area with a vibrant, young, artistic community and a diverse population coming from a variety of different ethnic and cultural backgrounds. Furthermore, Crossway’s founding organisations are already well established in this part of East London, through their ongoing work with local schools and communities.
The Trust is also supportive of the Crossway mission and recognizes its track record for improving intercultural relations, both locally and internationally. HRH the Prince of Wales also has a strong interest in the Art of the Islamic world, as demonstrated by the Prince’s School for Traditional Arts.
Supporting The Crossway Foundation:
The Crossway Foundation has begun fundraising in order to raise money both for acquisition and the capital costs of refurbishment and building work, and for the costs of producing technical documentations and paying consultants’ fees. The total cost of the project is likely to be between £3.5m and £4m.
Crossway and its constituent programmes have been generously supported since the beginning by philanthropic donations, grants and sponsorships. This support will be needed on a continuing basis, but the capital need for the new building will require a special effort on the part of all its friends and supporters.
The Prince’s Regeneration Trust and Crossway Foundation would like to involve private donors from the outset of this venture. In recognition of their financial support, funders will receive major accreditation and publicity in the UK and the Middle East if desired. As the project progresses, we would keep donors updated on developments and there would be the opportunity to visit the project during building work.
For all enquiries relating to the Crossway Foundation, please email: valeria@crossway-foundation.org