Cafe Art is letting everyone know how much the MYLONDON calendar gives back to the homeless community here in London by sharing a few memes with facts about how direct the help really is to the photographers with lived experience of homelessness.
Read article here https://www.cafeart.org.uk/post/ace-art-comp-exhibtion-is-open
Read article here: https://www.cafeart.org.uk/post/2021-calendar-success-big-payout-to-photographers-and-sheltering-vendors
As many people know, we're a social enterprise. To be precise, we're a registered Community Interest Company. As a CIC we have to have a social mission and for us it's to empower people affected by homelessness through photography and art and also to help the same people earn money from their creativity.
We are run on a shoestring budget. We are given free storage in The Corner Hotel in Whitechapel. Homeless Link give our one paid employee a desk to use when needed in their head office.
Our turnover is small but effective - but we pay out all the profits to the photographers and artists. In 2022/23 they earned about £24,000 from the 4,500 MYLONDON calendars sold. Since 2012 the combined total is even more, when Paul Ryan met Michael Wong and they decided to create an art calendar called ONE Cafe Art has paid out more than £225,000 from the calendar and photo sales alone. Over the years we have had a few grants. Between 2018 and 2020 participant Geraldine Crimmins ran an art group for us and 100% of two grants successfully awarded to us were given to her to run her projects. She has now set up her own art group called the Drummond Street Artists at Old Diorama working with many artists who have been participants in the Cafe Art exhibitions.
In 2020 we printed the 2021 MYLONDON and MYWORLD calendars online only because markets were closed because of Covid-19. For both calendars we paid the photographers again for their photos (which were from previous calendars) as they were "best of" calendars. We only made profits of £3,200 and that was paid out to calendar vendors from the previous year: David Fussell, Geraldine Crimmins, James Grey and Richard Fletcher, who shared the £3,200.
The 2024 MYLONDON calendar is selling online now. We need to raise £10,000 to print the calendars, cards and exhibition for this. Please pre-order your 2024 MYLONDON calendar now. They will be shipped in mid-October.
If you are an artist or photographer who has been homeless and you would like to sell the calendar with us, please contact us today at info@cafeart.org.uk
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