The National Archives: Resilience Grants

Overview

The Resilience Grants programme invites archives throughout the United Kingdom to apply for resilience-building projects of up to £20,000, with no minimum level of funding required.

The grant will fund projects lasting up to one year. The grant programme runs twice per year, with deadlines in around January and July.

What will they fund

The National Archives’ Resilience Grants programme has been designed to support archives to be adaptable, resilient and sustainable, creating lasting solutions that enable them to respond to change, and contribute to communities and the economy.

Archives Resilience projects could include (but are not limited to):

• proposals that would lead to increased organisational stability, including long-term organisational, financial and strategic planning
• increased staffing capacity and enhanced skills
• reduced costs
• increased income
• improving capacity to develop, care for and enrich collections, physically and digitally
• ensuring that collections are safely preserved, including digitally
• work on diversity, equity and inclusion
• responses to climate change, such as developing energy-efficiency within an archives service.

Each applicant is likely to have different needs and approaches to building organisational resilience.

• To help organisations tailor their proposals to their own challenges and opportunities, they ask that applicants make use of the Archives and Record Association’s Archives Service Resilience Indicator Tool, which is designed to provide archive services with a quick methodology for assessing resilience, and identifying gaps or areas for development.

You may also wish to investigate Archive Service Accreditation, the UK standard for good practice across archives services. A Resilience Grant and/or the Resilience Indicator Tool could be used as preparatory actions for an Accreditation application, and have been designed using the same standards and frameworks.

You can download the Archives Sector Resilience Indicator and guidance notes from the Archives and Records Association.

All grantees will be required to comply with the Code of Conduct for Recipients of Government General Grants and all relevant legislation, as well as the monitoring and evaluation conditions outlined above. Further conditions may be outlined within the Grant Funding Agreement.

Eligibility

The Archives Resilience grant programme is open to all eligible archives and heritage organisations in the United Kingdom. They cannot fund organisations based in the Channel Islands, the Isle of Man or whose collections are held outside of the United Kingdom.

The programme is open to all public sector bodies, not-for-profit organisations including registered charities, and for-profit organisations including business archives.

They use the definition of an archive collection as given within the Archive Service Accreditation Scheme:

“Materials created or received by a person, family or organisation, public or private, in the conduct of their affairs and preserved because of the enduring value contained in them or as evidence of the functions and responsibilities of their creator, especially those materials maintained using the principles of provenance, original order and collective control; permanent records.”

Society of American Archivists

If the archive is not currently accessible for public use, the organisation must have the intention to make the collection freely accessible to the public in the future.

The organisation must employ or have access to professional support from an archivist or similarly qualified professional.

There is no restriction on past applicants applying, however repeat applications are no more likely to receive funding, and you are strongly encouraged to speak to The National Archives’ Grants and Funding Office before submitting a second application for the same project. There are no restrictions on institutions submitting an application for a different project than was previously assessed.

Where appropriate, archives are encouraged to propose partnership projects and consortium applications are particularly welcome in this programme.