LEEDS 2023 believes that young voices are incredibly important. The Youth Fund has been designed for young people aged 14 – 30 across Leeds to develop projects driving social action in communities.

Young people have been at the core of this project throughout each step, and this fund has been entirely created by young people for young people.

If this is your first time applying for a grant, we have a set of online and in-person skills workshops to guide and train you through the process.

Embrace drummer Mike Heaton will be the special guest on Sunday 28 May when Old Chapel Music Studios in Leeds open its doors for the latest round of free public tours.    

The historic venue launched the initiative in November 2022 and will continue to host monthly tours until February 2024. 

This May and June a major new production of the late Kay Mellor’s A Passionate Woman will be staged in her memory at Leeds Playhouse – the theatre which first staged her breakthrough play 30 years ago.

"An incredible feel-good musical that will speak to the experiences of a huge amount of people on the universal themes of love, loss and the legacy we leave behind." Leeds Playhouse CEO and Artistic Director James Brining.

In November 2022 Leeds City Council's Employment and Skills Leeds and Leeds Culture Programmes hosted the first Leeds Creative Skills Festival. We welcomed over 2000 visitors to the Leeds first direct arena who spoke to over 60 exhibitors and attended a series of workshops and we are back for 2023.

We are currently accepting exhibitor bookings for the second festival which will be taking place on Monday 20th November 2023.

The festival is a unique opportunity to showcase everything Leeds has to offer in this sector.

One of our exhibitors last year told us:

Amy Letman, Creative Director Transform writes...

Over the last few years at Transform we have been thinking about the future of international festivals, who creates them, participates, and leads them. Festivals are by their nature transitory and temporary. Transform festival is known as a flurry of international performance and events that explodes into the cultural scene and then fleetingly passes. However, many of our projects leave lasting impressions long after the festival has culminated.

Immerse yourself in the atmosphere of one of Yorkshire’s historic worsted mills.



The mill’s archive contains over sixty thousand lengths of cloth, eight thousand fabric designs, five thousand dye cards, guard books and artefacts associated with nearly 200 years of cloth production. A source of inspiration for anyone fascinated by heritage and textiles.

Leeds 2023 and the WOW Festival have brought together 300 women and non-binary people for a giant construction project to build a barn on Cinder Moor and I’ve volunteered to be one of the Barn Builders.



Full disclosure, this isn’t the first time I’ve built a traditional timber frame building. Seven years ago, armed with two books bought from the internet and some basic woodwork skills, I set about designing and building a workshop in my back garden. It took me a year and I learnt a lot along the way, but that’s a story for another day.

The participants on our epic citizen films The Good Book and the Magician told us they wanted more specialist skills in backstage areas and we were so excited to oblige for those more interested in learning from the professionals in production areas. 

Leeds artists and creatives are invited to pitch ideas for short-form film projects for broadcast on Sky Arts, as part of the LEEDS 2023 Year of Culture.

We are asking artists to submit ideas that respond to the question:

Future Perfect: What’s worth fighting for?