National Lottery Heritage Fund: Heritage Innovation Fund

National Lottery Heritage Fund’s Heritage Innovation Fund awards grants of up to £25,000 to public and not-for-profit organisations, local authorities and private owners of heritage for projects to explore, test and grow new ways of working across the heritage sector. 

The Fund is a pilot initiative intended to build innovation capacity within, across and between different parts of heritage around a shared priority challenge area – the workforce, skills and ways of working needed for the future.   

‘New ways of working’ refers to the issues that relate to the future workforce (whether paid or voluntary). These issues impact whether organisations have the volume of staff and the skills to meet future demands on, and ambitions for, the UK’s diverse heritage – these might be connected to complex and wider issues of diversity, inclusion, relevance, audiences and interpretation.

The Heritage Innovation Fund is intended to involve three phases.

Phase 1: Explore

Explore is for organisations at the early ideas stage. This phase will focus on defining a clear problem statement and helping you to develop potential solutions for testing in practice.

This phase will provide access to:  

• grants of up to £25,000 to cover your time and activities during this phase (six months)
• expertise to help you develop your ideas and skills through a structured package of support  
• peer learning and exchange in a cohort

Subject to Board approval, further grants from the Heritage Innovation Fund may be available to support the following steps in the innovation process.

Phase 2: Test

This phase will offer support to put promising prototypes and ideas into practice to gather evidence of what works.

Phase 3: Grow

This phase will support you to implement findings more widely, embedding, sharing and rolling out good practice across the heritage sector.

Only applications for the Explore phase are currently being accepted. For support with your application, National Lottery Heritage Fund are running workshops to help you hone your idea (one event per organisation only) on Thursday 4 August, Wednesday 24 August and Tuesday 13 September

Deadline: Tuesday 27 September 2022, 12 noon

This fund is not managed by Funding for All. Please click ‘Find out more’ and contact the funder directly for more information.