The UK’s National Lottery has halted all new grant applications to divert money to its new £50m Heritage Fund, which has been launched to support the sector during the Covid-19 outbreak.
The fund will look to address “immediate pressures” over the next three-to-six months for those organisations most in need and will be open for applications within the next few days.
Grants of between £3,000 and £50,000 will be available to organisations across the full breadth of heritage, including historic sites, industrial and maritime heritage, museums, libraries and archives, parks and gardens, landscapes and nature.
Eilish McGuinness, the National Lottery Heritage Fund executive director, business delivery, said: “We know that circumstances are incredibly challenging for our heritage community right now and we want to do everything we can to support them. We hope this new fund will be a lifeline and a beacon of hope for organisations affected.
“Heritage has an essential role to play in making communities better places to live, creating economic prosperity and supporting personal wellbeing. All of these are going to be vitally important as we emerge from this current crisis.”
More than 80 per cent of people in the heritage sector reported Covid-19 has caused a high or moderate risk to their organisation’s long-term viability, according to a survey by the National Lottery of 1,250 respondents.
It also found 46 per cent of organisations said they could survive for no more than six months, while 75 per cent of respondents wanted greater flexibility for existing projects/grants, and 53 per cent asked for emergency funding.
Heritage Minister Nigel Huddleston said: “It is important that we do all we can to ensure our nation’s remarkable heritage landscapes, buildings and monuments – and the hardworking organisations that protect them – are supported at this difficult time.
“Heritage plays an important role in our communities by supporting jobs and economic growth as well as helping us to understand our shared past. This new £50 million package from the National Lottery Heritage Fund will help to protect our most at risk heritage throughout this unprecedented period.”
The National Lottery said it would continue to support the more than 2,500 projects that it has already committed to, an investment of more than £1bn.
In addition to the Heritage Emergency Fund, the organisation said it would be accelerating the provision of its £1.2m Digital Skills for Heritage initiative to help the sector through the crisis and beyond.
In the longer term, it has invested £4m in two Enterprise Development programmes across the UK for heritage leaders, and Business Support Programmes in all four countries.
Image:
Share this